Musings from a Matchbox

I have completed the commercial. In the end, I chose the waltz as the style in which to compose my piece, and I think the results are quite pleasing. I have violins, violas, celli, and contrabasses accompanied by timpani and cymbal crashes, and also a glockenspiel harmonising the melody, which the violin plays. I had originally intended to include the piano, but felt that there was already much happening in regard to orchestration, and that adding anything more would make it too complex. 

While the violins play the melody, the violas and celli are arpeggiating, although the latter at a slower rate, and the contrabasses and timpani play strong single notes to accent the downbeat. The timpani also, along with the cymbals, musically represent the various explosions and crashes that the advertisement depict.

I didn’t include a jingle as such for the Dell logo, as I felt it wouldn’t fit with the piece, and that the way the music finishes exactly when it appears would be enough of an impact for people to remember the name.

http://www.divshare.com/download/7345706-696

This task is pretty much completed and ready. Again, I may change parts yet, but as it is, I am happy to call this a day, so to speak, for now, and move on to other things. Most recently, at the suggestion of my classmate, I added more musical expression to movements such as blinking and reaching to grab Tom’s tail and stretching it, for example.

http://www.divshare.com/download/7257933-e3a

I have hopefully finished tweaking and changing this, now with a piano section at the end and some distortion and manipulation to follow the picture. I have also changed the music I had before and mixed it to my own satisfaction. I may change it still, but for the moment, I shall be content to work on everything else, and be prepared to hand in this version:

http://www.divshare.com/download/7257869-6b5

This is the current state of Task 1, the music for a 1 minute section of “Persona”. This is unfinished and I seem to be having trouble completing the last section. This is the section after the initial lights and the rolling film, and we start to see the cartoon of the woman washing herself.

I was thinking of writing a piece of music that would go with the cartoon, as if we were watching it normally, and have it change and distort according to what happens with the picture.

This week we looked at our work on film scenes. There was some really good work on Jurassic Park, Lord of The Rings, which made me realise the importance of the sounds used and how they accentuate the visuals. My work so far is something I am very happy with, as I have managed to create realistic effects from esoteric sources, for example, I have used the sound of a car passing by, with some editing, to create a ‘flying sound’ when Neo gets hit and flies backwards in slow motion.

In this week, I spent quite a lot of time searching for my film scene to score. I went through many which I had thought would be ideal as they were very active and emotive. Scenes I had in mind from (in no particular order) “The Shining”, “The Exorcist”, “Cloverfield”, “Scarface”, “Indiana Jones” and “Resident Evil” were perfectly plausible, but many of them seemed too iconic or had too much dialogue to re-record to use for the task. In the end, I settled for a personal favourite of mine: the fight scene in “The Matrix: Reloaded” where Neo fights against hundreds of Agent Smith clones.

This scene will be a challenge to score well as there are plenty of foley hits, smacks and the like to create and integrate, and also because there are a few times where the music will slow down or suddenly change to mimic the slow-motion shots and changes in movements.

In this week, we reviewed the current state of our work on music for commercials. Among them were some fairly good results. Julio took us through how to develop a simple melody into something more professional. It started with a simple line of notes, creating a melody. Then you can add octaves and other intervals to make it more interesting. After this process of adding to a single melody, you then begin to expand that melody into several different instruments, for example, putting the main tune on a piano or violin, and having a string quartet accompany it with the rest of the harmonic accompanying lines.

This week, we started Task 3 – Sound for Advertisements.

What we saw were some examples of Julio’s previous work done for Greek TV channel, Mega, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. We discussed methods of composition, where the general theory is that once you have a melody composed, the composition will come together more securely. Also discussed was strategies for success in the real world of ‘jingle-making’, how companies will use terms like ‘not happy enough’ and ‘needs more bounce’ as a way of describing your work, and that we should create many versions of the same work to present to a client, to get a clearer picture of what is required.

We also learned that there is a specific structure to the advert breaks between programs, and that there are different types of advert: stings, promos, and next-ons.

We also tried our hand at composing a short piece for a channel ID of aforementioned Mega, as practice for doing the task.

I have chosen an advert from Dell for my task. In the video, many old computers are being destroyed in a variety of ways, and then a ‘beautiful’ new Dell rises up out of them. For this, I am torn between a number of different styles of music. One is a cool, chilled-out kind, reminiscent of “Epoca” by Gotan Project, used for many adverts in the past. The other is a slow, slightly humourous, waltz style. Respectively, one seems to emphasise the ‘beauty’ that the advert concentrates on of the new computer, and the other conveys that it sweeps aside the older, uglier competition with the ease and grace of a waltz. I shall compose both till I decide to go with one of the other.

This week we watched and criticised our work on Task 2, the animation soundtrack. There were some really excellent offerings on show; mostly on cartoons other than the prescribed. One thing I noticed about them is that they are all cartoons without speech. This would make sense in that, unless you are writing a surrealist style cartoon (e.g. as an artwork rather than a children’s TV program) orchestral and electronic sounds as speech wouldn’t really fit with the style of the show.

With this task, like the previous, I find myself thinking that all the cartoons are going to have the same sound effects and orchestral techniques used for the same respective actions and atmospheres, especially since we are all reflecting on the writing style of Carl Stalling with the Looney Tunes music. It is, however, interesting to see that this style is so instinctive and flexible, that it can be written, with some success, for cartoons from all the other sources, such as Disney and Hannah-Barbera for example. I myself have chosen a ‘Tom & Jerry’ cartoon to score and the familiarity to the work so far to the Looney Tunes (and even the original soundtrack) is quite significant.

In this work I think it will be very difficult to produce anything dissimilar to that which has gone before, as the style is so imprinted in our minds that nothing else seems to work as well.

This week we started Task 2, to score an animated cartoon. We discussed the works of Carl Stalling and watched a cartoon of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, while listening and noting down the functions of the soundtrack. This included things such as sychronised footsteps, dynamics, and ‘falling’ music.

Regarding the task, I think that Looney Tunes cartoons in general will be easier to write the soundtrack for than many others, as their expressiveness and the action on screen has been paired with this style of music writing for decades. This pairing has been played to this generation (and others) throughout their lives, so they will be familiar with the ideas within, even if they do not realise it.