Category: Research

After watching through Fare Thee Well a few times I had a few ideas about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with the film. From what I took from the film was that the character is a loner and he’s interested in the military, history, war or just Napoleon Bonaparte.

I wanted to try and incorporate both of these points into the score I made so I thought the right sort of music for the film would be military based so marching drums and brass instruments. I started by looking online for videos of people performing these pieces and quite quickly I found people playing marching snare solos. I really liked these pieces as I felt they fit the two things I really noticed in the film. I felt the solo instrument resonated with emphasising the characters loneliness and the snare fit with the military/war theme running throughout the film.

My main influence for how I’d go about using music in the film came from the film Birdman. The score by Antonio Sanchez is made up of mainly solo drum pieces with the occasional inclusion of long sustained notes. I didn’t want to copy his style of drumming I just like how the music is used at times when the character is stressed to help emphasise how he is feeling. This was what I wanted to do with the score.

Antonio Sanchez – The Anxious Battle for Sanity – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq_0vn1TNP8

To start making this piece I looked at different styles of military music and what tempos they were at. At first I wanted to make something that would have been used in Napoleon’s wars but as they were a lot larger in terms of instrumentation I opted to do something more like American marching band drum solos.

School Drum Off – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTsvjXYDwQQ

 

I’ve been reading throughout the semester bits and bobs about how music functions in film. One of the main things I looked into was leitmotifs. I was hoping that I could’ve made something like that for the Stonethrow Films project but it wasn’t something they really wanted to do so instead I’m going to try and include that in the Fare Thee Well film.

A leitmotif is piece of music that is used throughout a film and is used to represent a character, mood or various other repeated things in a film. For example a really popular leitmotif is The Imperial March in Star Wars written by John Williams. This piece is used in scenes with Darth Vader and can be heard at various points throughout the film.

I spent time working on my big band piece for Stonethrow Films, the example they’d given me for what they wanted was In The Mood by Glenn Miller. After listening through the piece a few times I found the song was made up of brass, drums and a double bass. I tried writing many different ways usually starting with a melody however none of them really managed to stick with me or the group so after about 5 attempts I tried something new and started with a drum rhythm, this was a lot more productive but I spent a lot of time fiddling with getting the right time signature and tempo. After I made  a drum loop that I’d liked I started work on making a little bass line, I just made a walking bass line the goes up back down and has a little fill at the end. After this I added the stabs just to add something to increase the pace. Finally I made a little melody that I really slammed on with the velocity of each note, this was because when the velocity was maxed it made the notes bend and break up slightly and sounded more realistic.

http://www.normanweinberg.com/uploads/8/1/6/4/81640608/911811kb_swing_part_1.pdf (I used this to figure out how to make a drum rhythm)

For next semester I will be working on a documentary about sexual harassment in Australia. The group have decided they want to make a crowd funding campaign to raise money to fund our project. I worked with them on making a video to sell our idea to people I made a short, simple piece of music for the film. I didn’t want it to be too busy as it would take away from the narration explaining what the documentary would be about. I made a simple synth line of 4 notes and looped it. I then used a didjeridoo sample, downtuned it and staked 5 of them together to play on points throughout the film where there was vital information that they wanted to add impact to.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/88-days-documentary-film#/ (Link to the crowd funder with the video on it.)

So I played around with Shepard Tones some more. I’ve had various successful attempts and several more failures. I created a Shepard scale easily enough, basically it’s a chromatic scale that starts on a C3  playing 1 8th note, then 2 8th notes on the C# and carrying on on each key until you reach the C4 which you hit once. Playing this over 3 octaves so starting on C2, C3 and C4 and automating the volume of the lower octave up as it progresses through the scale and automating the the volume of the upper octave down tricks the ear into hearing a never ending scale. This was all well and good and easily achievable however as it’s a chromatic scale it’s not exactly the most musical and it’s not easy to hide in a song so I instead tried with sine waves. I used the ESX24 in Logic for this. Instead of playing a scale I simply automated the pitch up on the varying octaves so it was one single tone. This was unsuccessful, after spending 3 days watching tutorials and and trying to blend together the starts and ends of the files I gave in. The problem was that the sine waves frequency rate was different at the end of the clip to at the start so that when I tried to blend them together there was always a pop. I am still experimenting with making Shepard Tones however instead I simply opted to automate the pith over the duration of held notes.This is similar but doesn’t have the same effect sadly but it’s close enough for me to get across what I’m trying to do with the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLdxUsSAzDU – (I used an Ableton tutorial as the the principles are the same it’s just Logic had rubbish tutorial videos)