Filming

Now that there is a structure to the pop song we have decided it is time to start the video. We have been thinking about the video whilst composing the song and thought that we would use the Little red riding hood theme. Yesterday we drew up storyboards, most of the shots we had already considered. We had a few influences from the Metz Judderman video and the old Nosferatu film. We also watched a few Svankmajer films and got a few ideas. Carla suggested we do some animation type effects like the Peter Gabriel Sledgehammer video with our clothes. We intend to make the video abit silly using these different techniques and influences. We will film next week so this we are making preparation to our costumes and the set. We have bought red pashminas and red and black stripy socks, we have also planned objects in the 'grandmothers room'. We visited an exhibit at the mac called 'folk art and fairy tales' were we had a few ideas, so today we made paper mache toadstools and carla has an old pillow case that we will make into wolf ears. We also had a chat with Nick about post production effects and intend to try and replicate the handcranked camera effect and masking effects used in the Judderman video this way. We are also interested in fiddling with the colours like dulling everything and highlighting the reds and/or green.  

Japanese Pop Song?

Today Carla and I placed our vocals onto the mix, they sound quite good with us both singing together, very popy! There are still quite a few things we need to do to complete the song.

• Level out vocals
• Create outro
• Pull in more sounds to decorate the second half
• Include a shamisen for a more japanese (and musical) feel

We do have a complete structure to the song which shows we are progressing (if slowly), these things always take twice as long as you think they will. I need to find out how to use general MIDI instruments in ProTools.

The end is near!

Carla and I have made big progress on our composition. We have pulled some more sounds into the mix and extended the rhythm section. It sounds impressive! There are a few quality issues I'm still worried about but feel the creative process is flowing atm so will sort them out later! Today Carla and I recorded the vocals together so they are on tone and in time so the next step is to place them onto the composition to form a vocal line. We will do this on monday and hopefully create a final structure. Hopefully we will start thinking about the filming at least by wednesday.

A composition is formed! (and Logic really does suck)

Carla and I have made some process on the composition!! At last, it seemed that the logic interface really held us back where we were trying to solve problems for hours. Incredibly frustrating! I was VERY pleased when we pulled everything into ProTools. WOHOO! I will make the observation that the logic visual interface was better to compose rhythm to, and we have spent the last few days dragging our location sounds into logic and chopping them up and placing them to create a beat, it sounds quite interesting (if not abit cheesy) We have had to place a rather destructive high pass filter on the samples because of the ambient noise, we could get rid of the noise using Sparks TC Denoise, which I intend to investigate. We bounced the rhythm and pulled it into a ProTools session (HURRAH!) and pulled in all the sounds we've been working on and put it together. I had made a really long sample, containing a rather sinister sounding low frequency rumble, we felt it set the scene rather well and glued the rest together. I have also given the vocal line to a musician friend and she transcribed the vocals and suggested a few chords that would work well. The result was really cheesy, I am really interested in using the MIDI instruments to play around with these chords but I haven't used it for years and can't seem to get it to work. We intend to rerecord the vocals so they fall on a beat (therefore changing the timings of the dance) and we worked on this today. We will rerecord so the notes are on tone aswell in order to place chords and a bass line on the composition. I am to create a good bass sound by manipulating our samples for tomorrow in soundhack or spear. We have also discussed the video a few times and intend to film after have have our composition completed. I am not sure of this arrangement having researched visual and sound in my undergrad, may suggest we start thinking about locations and ideas in some sort of order before we complete the song. However it will be a pop song and I suppose the video is always made after the song is.

The Next Step

The next step was to think about the backing music to our vocal line. Carla and I discussed the idea of composing something musical but neither of us had much experience in writing japanese pop music. It could possibly been interesting but we decided that we were both more interested in making the pop song more experimental and abstract which works better with our theme. We decided that the composition would include the samples we recorded (most of which we didn't use) to create the backing by altering them to sound as we wished. We were interested in creating the atmosphere of the woods from litte red riding hoods story, so we messed around with the sounds and have so far come up with owls, mouse and bird sound an excellent growl sound from carla and a few other bit and pieces. We decided we wanted some sort of rhythm to the piece (something for the dancing to look for carla suggested), so we thought of footsteps as a kick and leaves on trees to be cymbols. We went out with an Edirol portable recorder to record some sounds in the park. We spent the rest of the week, editing this sounds (using high pass filters to eliminate traffic noise etc). Next week, we will carry on composing sounds and discuss the composition as a whole.

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Carla and I recorded our vocal line by recording it as MIDI data into Logic and using Kontakt as a plug-in to bounce the samples. It was still incredibly difficult to get the samples to trigger from the same movement uniformly. With alot of practise this could be easier, however the following problems are apparent:

• The samples are triggered on a first in first out basis, so if an arm movement accidently triggers the shoulder joint instead of the elbow the wrong sample will be play and the intended sample will be discarded. There is no way around this because we wanted the samples to play one after the other, and so turned note stealing off.
• The rhythm of the dance was constricted because one had to wait for each sample to finish before performing the next movement to trigger the next sample.

We recorded the nearest match to what we intended. We are still deciding whether we should rerecord this vocal line ourselves to make it sound less disjointed.