I decided to minimize the amount of posts devoted to this project… so this thread combines most into one larger captain’s log. This reads in reverse chronology, so the most recent posts are at the top. Enjoy!
Rendering The Day Away. — 04 May 2008, 5:25pm
Well we’re in rendering phase, meaning all the work is finally wrapping up. Spent most of today at the HQ doing final music mixes and figuring out what scenes they would fit underneathe.
I think we used small portions of 4 of the songs I crafted, including a last minute bit of generic drum and bass I sampled and looped for a scene.
In all I think my aspect of the creation process went pretty okay — some music really fit the mood of the story and was generally well received. Hopefully it will all sound okay when all mixed together and the cues work well…we sorta had to rush through that part at the end just to get it done.
More thoughts on the process plus posting of the songs later.
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Melodramatic String Swells — 04 May 2008, 10:04am
Wow yesterday was a terrible day to be cooped up in the house writing music — pretty tempting to ditch this stuff and take advantage of the nice weather. But at least I didn’t have to pull an all-nighter like the rest of the team did.
I worked on a few ideas until about 2am Saturday morning, then had a leisurely morning before hunkering down around 1030am to get to work. Spent most of the day working on about six different themes, in various levels of completion. Some pretty okay, some not so much, and some good but probably not ideal for this project. (Tonight, I’ll post all the music I worked on.)
Overall, the group seemed to like most of the tracks I previewed for them so hopefully that’s a good sign that despite working in a bubble, I was able to capture the mood of what they were going for. I went primarily a bit dark and quirky, hoping that if anything it could be moody background noise if anything else. I think I left a lot of repetition and minimalism in the songs so that it wouldn’t distract from the story. Don’t look for any melodramatic string swells that cue the titular line or anything like that.
Today while the rest of the team recovers from Friday night’s all night writing session and Saturday’s all day shooting and digitizing, I will be putting some final touches and overdubs to what I have. And then final mixing and syncing with the final film. The end is in sight.
More later.
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1, 2, 3 Break. — 02 May 2008, 10:19pm
Some of the various groups are breaking off now to go secure shooting locales for tomorrow and for the writing team to figure out what the fuck everyone just discussed for the last 3 hours.
Which means it was my cue to exit gracefully for the night and get to work.
So far there is a definite notion that since they are able to shoot at some bar and therefore the story will start there, I will need some bar music. Easy enough to make some distant sounding rock thing or some break beat loops. My approach to this is not to have true music cues or dramatic swells that will distract from the movie, but rather diegetic music that will be simply heard as if the audience is the main character … that is if a character on screen is not around a source of music, there shouldn’t be any. We’ll see if that works.
Just ordered some foods, so I’ll be digging in soon enough after that. More later.
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Get Out Your Drama Sauce. — 02 May 2008, 8:16pm
Sitting with the crew of people, most I don’t know. So far all we seem to have is the assigned requirements that must be found somewhere in the film:
Genre — Drama (awfully vague, but uh okay)
Line — “I’ll be glad when he’s gone.”
Prop — Sauce (no labels)
Character — Larry or Lori Gardener
Occupation — Designer
Obviously leaves a lot to the imagination. Right now they are discussing an idea about a guy or girl sitting at bar relating a story… sounds like a romantic, existential story about love or something like that… I would detail more about this aspect but I’m not sure they know just yet. We will probably cut away at some point, or many times as he’s narrating, to show the actual situation he’s in.
We’ll see how it develops…stay tuned.
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Chainsaw Samples and Robot Rom Coms — 02 May 2008, 12:15pm
Getting closer to go time… that is after I go have a post-work drink to wash away the work week tears.
I spent part of today putting together a list of resources for some free, public domain sound effects and music queues… just in case I need something to sample. I am guessing I’ll prob use my own musics, but you never know when you need the sound of a chainsaw or a rocket.
Out of all the genres that we could possibly be assigned, I’m really pulling for something in the horror or sci fi realm… both because I think moody atmospherics are easier to pull off with my arsenal of music things and because I hope I don’t have to play some sappy acoustic emo guitar shite. Not sure if you can hybridize the genres, like say if you were to be assigned romantic comedy but decided to make it a robot rom com instead. Gotta stick with what I’m good at.