Earthwaves studio – up and running!

It was love at first sight.

Upon return from Alicante and searching for a permanent dwelling led Lance to the area of Woodfieldside in the village of Pontllanfraith in South Wales. A coach house was recommended by a work colleague which was was viewed, loved and an offer put down in a very short space of time – and just in time as well, this being 2020 and on the cusp of the first lockdown.

The house was nice enough and suited Lance’s needs but it was one essential factor that sealed the deal: the garage. It was larger than most and offered the kind of space for creativity he longed for since leaving the family home. Mike saw both the space and the potential too; the place just had to be bought.

Fast forward two years and after a period of slowly pulling one’s finger out – so to speak – the space intended for car storage is now a place of unbridled creativity. The inauguration ceremony of Earthwaves Studios was celebrated with the breaking of glass; in this case not with a bottle of champers but the smashing of an old shower door on the floor of the garage.

To explain: Mike’s recent re-modelling of his bathroom at Broom meant the extraction (and destruction) of the old shower doors, made of toughened glass. Upon smashing one at his house and finding the breaking and the sound of the continual splintering of the shards afterwards quite inspiring, Mike suggested taking the remaining panel down to Lance’s newly-acquired gaff and capturing the breaking of it on multiple cameras.

After a lengthy set up in the garage – taking all precautions as this was a potentially dangerous undertaking! – the subject was ready to be smashed and captured by an HD camera, two phone cameras on slow motion setting and an audio recorder for the subsequent splintering sounds. The panel turned out to be a resilient bugger – a lot of objects were flung onto its surface which it shrugged off. It finally took one big stone from the garden to break the surface and even that took two goes. But the result was fantastic.

The collected footage from three cameras and a sound card have now been combined into the video below. The photographs of the splintered glass is already being considered for use in an ongoing video project…

One of the many things that Mike and Lance have learned through the Earthwaves partnership is that anything may be useful in a future endeavour, usually in the most unexpected ways. It’s why any idea, however trivial or mundane, should never be discarded.

As for the Earthwaves Studio… well, it has truly popped it’s cherry if you’ll pardon the expression. The same weekend saw all manner of green screen, costume and video projection experiments. Just the beginning….