Meeting With Dave 5

Joseph Pallot / / Meetings

After going to the Home filming and clearing everything up with the media group we were able to finish filming the club scene, and while we weren’t able to record anything from the actual filming on the scene we explained that we had gotten some on-set ADR to fill in some lines for the scene if needed. We were also able to report that we had booked in the dates for the rest of the filming.

In this meeting we were also able to refine our learning objectives slightly more to tailor them more to our own personal needs.

Meeting With Dave 4

Joseph Pallot / / Meetings

In this meeting with Dave we discussed potential problems that were arising with the film crews, mainly the fact that the media team didn’t know how we were going to be able to record audio in a reverberant space, this problem was caused mainly due to using Facebook messenger to try an explain processes to people that don’t have the same understanding of audio equipment as us, so meanings being lost in translation.

We did still end up going to the Home filming, and once in person we were able to get the radio microphones out and give the team a demonstration on what they looked like and how they worked.

Music – Creation Process

Joseph Pallot / / LO2, music

To create the music I used Logic as it has a more easily accessible array of synthesisers and software instruments. From my research I decided to limit the amount of layers I would put into my project so looked for Synth sounds that would complement the film well.

After I had found a suitable sound I would play through some ideas, recording them before moving them onto different tracks to see which melodies suited which sounds best. This gave me the freedom to use ideas that wouldn’t necessarily be useful within the first track I recorded them onto but still made good music once the sound/tempo were altered.

After I had created 4-6 usable ideas, Callum and myself would sit and line up the tracks to the sections that we thought needed music to check which tracks would work in which places.

Music Research – Reading

Joseph Pallot / / LO2, music, research

https://wistia.com/blog/composing-music-for-video

 

I found this website to be helpful with getting into the right mindset to write music that wasn’t for my own personal enjoyment. It helped me to realise that the right music for the film needed to fit the general atmosphere of the story line.

By this time I had already watched through the film at least 15 times, because of the other aspects we were creating, and from this I had been able to work out that the main direction the film was going for was deception, so I wanted the music to be deceptive too, mixing together two emotions that wouldn’t usually be found together to create an uneasy track.

The main challenge in creating my own brief for the music was that I had very little direction from the director or producer. Before I created the tracks I was told that they wanted something “atmospheric” and “tense”. After showing the team the tracks for the first time I was asked to change one of the tracks to “something more different” and so created a different track using different synths while keeping to the same uneasy feel of the film.

 

https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/using-ambient-techniques-for-composing–audio-4017

 

I found the introduction and first section of this post to be very useful to creating music that was designed to be in the background of the film. The main limitation I set myself for the music was to not distract at all from the plot and visual of the film, but rather to add to it. To do that I limited myself to creating my music using a maximum of 3-4 tracks for layering, this ensured that I would create music that was thin enough that it wouldn’t overpower the rest of the audio components of the film while also giving me an inspiration to only include music that would benefit the film rather that just going for the most fancy tracks that I could create.

Speaker problems and considerations

Joseph Pallot / / LO3, problems

A major problem we ran into towards the end of this project was interaction with the media group, which we eventually found out was because of the speaker quality that they were listening to our finished tracks through.

We were able to meet with the group to find out what was wrong and when they played the track through the speakers they were using the bass and treble frequencies were boosted while the mids were dropped.

This obviously gave them a bad impression of the quality of work that we had given them. This was later rectified once we had taken them into the sound theatre, and showed them the same mix with the higher quality speakers. This has made us reconsider the way we worked, and in future we will invite media groups into the sound theatre to listen to our work so they can have an accurate representation of what we’re really going to be giving them in the finished package.

This problem confused us when we first heard that the group was unhappy with the audio and was having a lot of bad problems with it because we had run everything through Izotope Insight so we knew that it was within loudness regulations and that there was nothing bad happening with the EQ of the different sections.

Once the media team had heard the true version of the work we were presenting them with they were completely fine and happy with the project, even cancelling some of the changes they were requesting because the film sounded different to how they were hearing it on their setup.