Out on the Hills

The penultimate day of the project was to go out onto Hednesford Hills and use our newly built machines to do our recordings.

The Hednesford Hills are an area of heath and woodland that are part of Cannock Chase, they are right next to the school and they are a great place to see wildlife. The hills are a nature reserve and have lots of interesting plants and animals living on them. There is Heather, Gorse, Oak, Pine and Birch Trees, Bilberry, and grasses. In the area we went to there was also a marshy pond which was alive with frogs. There are also cattle which help maintain the unique environment by eating the grass and invasive plants, these cattle are a breed called Dexters and they have very short legs.

In the morning of the day of filming we made a few adjustments to the machines and made sure they would be able to work when we were out of the classroom, we also made sure that our ways of attaching the cameras and microphones was going to work. After all these checks had been made we headed out onto the hills, carrying, towing or pushing our machines, along the paths until we reached the spot where we thought it would be good to make our work.

After setting up our machines in our chosen positions we had a chance to sit down and enjoy the environment around us, it was very peaceful and enjoyable, while the machines were doing their work- and it was not raining which was excellent. There were quite a few people about walking their dogs, and it was interesting to see their reactions to the machines

The recording took about 30 minutes and then we went back and collected our machines and equipment. Here are some more images of our machines on the hills.

Once all the recordings had been made we set off back to school making sure that we brought all of our machines and equipment with us (and any bits, as there were a few casualties along the way).