Producer Profile: Mira Burt-Wintonick

"I wanted to find a way to capture that feeling of being overwhelmed with memory."

Mira Burt-Wintonick is an assistant producer on WireTap, whose independent documentary Muriel's Message won this year's Best New Artist Award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. We talked to Mira at Third Coast, and later sent her a few questions through the miraculous internet tubes.

Mira Burt-Wintonick takes it to the streets.

PRX: You do a lot more than radio: you blog, take some great photographs, play the piano, and you won "best documentary" in the Montreal Student Film Festival. What's your favorite medium to work with, and why?

Mira: I don't think I have a favorite medium, per say, though documentaries are definitely my favourite form. And I have a very open definition of documentary which includes just about anything as long as it's not completely made up. Sometimes I think that my love of documentary might be a love of convenience because I'm not very good at creating things from scratch, but my dad is also a documentary filmmaker and so I was raised to believe that the most interesting stories are the ones that are real. And I still tend to think that's accurate, though I also love doc/fiction hybrids and the blurring of truth with the not-so-truth.

Lately, though, my medium of choice has been audio. I started thinking about audio in terms of sound design for film, which I thought was a great way to work with images and sound at the same time, so I wouldn't have to choose between the two. But I started having so much fun working with just the sound that I gradually began to leave the image part up to somebody else. I like the way tiny and subtle changes in sound can have powerful and sometimes mysterious effects on what we see and how we see it. And with well-produced audio-driven media like soundscapes or radio docs, the visuals aren't even missed because the sound is doing such a great job of creating its own images, and I really like the challenge of making that happen.

Mira likes to listen.

I do get video production cravings once in a while, though, and so I try to mix things up. I'm currently working on a feature video doc with my dad, so I'm getting my fix.

PRX: How did you begin working at WireTap, and what do you do there?

Mira: The gig with WireTap pretty much fell into my lap. I was in a Sound Production class at Concordia two years ago and Jonathan Goldstein came to give a talk about radio and eavesdropping and other such things. WireTap was one of my favorite programs at the time, so I spoke to him briefly afterwards, but a few months later he called up the sound Professor and asked him to recommend two students who might be interested in doing an apprenticeship with the show. So I had an interview and somehow weasled my way into the CBC as an unpaid intern.

After that first semester, they must have realized they enjoyed having the extra hand because they hired me and now, well I don't really have a title, but I guess you'd say I'm an assistant producer/editor on the show. I tech the recording sessions and edit various interview segments or Jonathan's monologues and mix promos. It's basically my dream job, so I'm having a blast. PRX: You're also currently a TA (and student?) at Concordia University. Do you enjoy teaching?

I'm still a part-time student at Concordia as well as a Sound TA there. I absolutely love TA-ing, despite the early morning workshops and middle of the night calls from frantic students. I work with about 30 first-year sound students a semester, giving them ProTools and minidisc workshops and providing feedback on their projects. Sound is a required class for all first year Communication students, so a lot of them have never really thought about audio as a medium before, and it's always exciting to see how their thinking about sound develops throughout the semester. They come up with such wild and crazy ideas, it's actually really inspiring.

I'll be finishing up my Undergrad in April, but I would definitely love to pursue teaching sound or radio in the future.

PRX:Your piece "Muriel's Message" won the award for "best new artist" at this year's Third Coast International Audio Festival. What made you decide to create this piece, and how was your Third Coast experience?

A box of unlabled audio cassettes.

Mira: Muriel's Message was a final project for my third year sound class. I found a tape of my grandmother, Muriel's, voice, as the piece describes, and as soon as I heard it, I knew I had to do something with it. My grandmother passed away about ten years ago and I found myself thinking of her less and less as time went on. I could picture the way she looked, but not summon any kind of complete sense of her beyond that. But when I listened to the tape, just hearing her voice again had such an impact on me that I wanted to find a way to capture that feeling of being overwhelmed with memory, even if just for myself so I wouldn't forget about her again. The winter holidays were also approaching, and I thought a portrait of my grandmother would be a nice gift for my mum for Christmas.

Third Coast was absolutely fantastic. I seriously learned more about radio in those 2.5 days of conference and listening sessions than I would in a whole semester of media studies at school. I don't think I've ever been surrounded by so many sound people before, and that creates an incredible atmosphere. I'm already looking forward to next year, if I can manage to make my way down there again.

PRX: You also have a piece up on PRX called "Myoma," which you describe as a "soundscape in uterium for an unseen horror film." Was this created alongside an idea for a film? Did you also compose the music we hear in this piece?

Mira: Last winter, a friend of mine asked if I'd create a soundscape for a horror film he was working on and "Myoma" is what I came up with, though I hadn't actually seen the film. The director described a scene for me in which a baby is birthed out of someone's skull, and so the soundscape is the way I imagine the world sounding like to a baby growing inside a womb inside someone's head.

At work.

I created the "music" you hear in the piece through found sound, so in a way I composed it, although it's all based on existing recordings. I found one record of a microphone which was actually placed inside a woman's uterus while she was pregnant; you're supposed to play it for newborns as a comforting reminder of their pre-birth sonic environments. This comes in as the deep pulsing you hear half-way through the piece. After mixing the entire soundscape, I re-recorded it from the inside of a hollowed out cantaloupe in order to create the muffled ambience of a womb.



PRX: Is "Muriel's Message" your favorite audio piece that you've created?

Mira: Yes, definitely. It's only my second audio documentary, but I'm more satisfied with the way it turned out than the first. I think I was more demanding of mysef producing this piece than I normally would be, though I always try to be picky, but because of the intimate nature of the piece and the personal subject matter, I became extremely invested in every element of the production and basically wanted it to be as good as I had time to make it. There are a few things I would change, though, if I were to go back into it. For one, I'd love to rewrite the ending. I find endings to be really tricky, and the last few sentences of my script are a bit too cheesy for my taste, but unfortunately I just couldn't come up with anything better before the deadline. And I would pay more attention to the details of the scoring as well, in terms of when the music fades up, and how fast.

Serious intern.

PRX: Who's inspired you in the Wonderful World of Radio?

Mira: I've been inspired by all kinds of sound people, from radio producers to musicians to sound designers. Just to name a few, Joe Richman and Radio Diaries, Jonathan Goldstein, Ira Glass and the fine folks at This American Life, Negativland, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Walter Murch, Owe Svensson, and all kinds of producers who I just discovered at Third Coast, like Jonathan Mitchell and Kari Hesthamar.

© 2006, The Public Radio Exchange