Pete Sperring’s Online Presence

Hey people.  I thought I’d just show you which painting I’ve chosen to do for the latest task.  I’ve chosen “Girl Before a Mirror” by none other than Pablo Picasso.  Maybe Picasso was an obvious choice in the cubist stakes, but I dont care.  I like the picture and I can see how I can turn it to music.  Anyway, here’s the picture.

 I’ve had a few ideas so far.  The picture kind’ve dictates to me what the score should be.  We see a beautiful girl, perhaps pregnant, staring into the mirror.  However, whilst the left hand side of the image shows us this girl, the right hand side where the reflection is located reveals a darker side of her personality, almost as if the beautiful image is just for show, and within she is a troubled soul.  Maybe we all see a troubled soul when we look in the mirror, but then maybe I’m thinking too much about it.  Anyway… The score I have decided should reflect this, reading left to right, starting off with a beautiful, almost majestic style, but after reaching the halfway point taking a darker turn.  Thinking back to Murch’s score for THX 1138, and subsequently inspired by it, I am going to reverse the first half of the score, as if the music were also reflecting in the mirror, and then compose over the top of the new reversed soundtrack.  Once reversed the music will have an eerie feel anyway, and so should be relatively easy to evolve into an overll darker piece.

The lines throughout the picture, such as those on the girls closes and the diamond wallpaper should dictate the way the instruments swell in and out of the composition.  I’ve made a simple flash video of the painting with a line that scrolls across the painting like a playhead, so this should enableme to follow the lines more accurately than if I were to simply imagine a scrolling bar.

I’ll post the results/video up as soon as I’ve got a rough demo together of how it all sounds.

Peace.x

When I have finished the music track and mixed everything properly I’ll upload another version and explain the process etc.

Peace. x

Seeing as most people seem intent on wasting their degrees, and we ran out of lesson time, I thought I’d upload the rough version of my advert for everyone to see.  I’ve chosen the Smirnoff “Sea” vodka advert from a year or so ago.

I didn’t really have a direction at first for the music in the ad, other than that it should sound vaguely Russian like the product.  I remembered the phrase “good composers borrow, great composers steal” which Julio has mentioned a few times in our seminars.  With this in mind I decided to re-work an old song of mine from a few years back.  Thus I wanted my song to morph from the rock genre into an epic orchestral march.  I simply replaced the guitar line from the song with strings and slowed it down.  It instantly took on the epic feel that I desired.

As the advert plays on and events unfold, I felt that the piece should increase in tempo to heighten the tention.  The good thing from the workshop today is that I definitely feel my score has good form.  There is a clear beginning, middle and end to the piece.  A slow start, which speeds up during the middle, and then slows back down at the end.  This speed change was something I was weary of as I remembered the original advert doing the same thing, but after listening to the original soundtrack again, it doesn’t gain speed, it gains in instrumentation.

With regard to branding, outside of the march theme to the score, I was quite pleased with the ‘logo’ in the final sequence.  It has a slightly eerie feel to it, but matches the on screen text in that is is very clear.  The whole point of the ad campaign was to point out Smirnoff’s purity.  The logo I felt should reflect this, and so I kept instrumentation and sound effects to a minimum whilst the logo sounds.

This is not the finished product as of yet, the sound effects on the hit points need to be added.  The water sound that is there at the minute is merely to give an impression of the final product.

Let me know what you think.  Also, if anyone is interested in hearing the original song that I wrote years ago, let me know and I’ll put it up here on the blog.

Enjoy.

Over the weekend I watched Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, and Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”  The two films had a very similar score; high pitched strings with no particular melody line. In Close Encounters, Williams has used these strings to convey the tension in scenes where there is extra-terrestrial involvement, but said beings are not actually displayed to the viewer.  In the same way as Williams score to “Jaws”, the viewer experiences the tension aurally, and to see the alien visitors/shark is not neccessary.  Ultimately though, in Close Encounters, Williams is simply highlighting on screen stimuli provided by flashing bright lights.  The Shining’s soundtrack by Krzysztof Penderecki, is very similar aurally, but is used in a totally different way.  It forces the film into periods of extreme tension in scenes where very little is happening.  An innocent conversation becomes a stressful event.  The score alone has transformed the mood of the scene.

I thought back to my Persona video and how I could use this technique to add to the video.  Originally I had used mostly low frequency sounds to provide a tense atmosphere that was building to something.  Having seen the two films at the weekend, I think it would be a good idea to add some high strings.  The lack of a melody would increase the tension in the clip tenfold.  Previously, I had quite a weak melody line towards the back end of the clip and I realise that if anything, the strings I had added, might as well not be there;  They add very little to the clip, emotionally or aurally.

Before the playthrough of my clip today, I was fairly happy with the results of the direction I had taken.  I knew it needed more work, but now I feel it needs a lot more work.  Julio refered to my piece jokingly as ‘soup’.  I found this particularly amusing as my diet has mainly consisted of soup for the past week or so.  You are what you eat.

He was right though.  I set out to create a tense atmosphere and a sense of pace as if the video were building to something bigger.  For this reason I wanted a lot in the lower frequency range.  I realise now though that I need to increase the frequency range somewhat so that the video becomes less of a dirge.  I wanted my clip to sychronise with the sound as much as possible because I wanted to take advantage of the audio-visual contract.  I really like the fact that if you are watching something, you’ll believe any sound associated to it, as long as it’s not out of place.

With regard to strings, I wanted them fairly simple, as midi strings tend to sound fake.  But after seeing the options to vary the strings today in Logic I will definetly be making more of the strings in my clip adding some in higher octaves without hesitation.  I do already have a few sounds in much higher frequencies but they didn’t seem to come through in the playback today.  In fact, the volume of the whole soundtrack seemed to be quite low.  It definelty needs to be louder.

The one thing I am proud of so far though, is the sound effects.  I didn’t want to use any clips or pre-recorded sound samples, and so set out to make the sound of the reel to reel myself, with my own recorded sounds.  By recording myself shaking various types of objects, I managed to get some recording that sounded like something was spinning round.  I love foley, so it was important for me to do this.  Also, I really wanted to use sounds that had no relation whatsoever to the reel to reel tape player.  Using some clever delay I managed to use part of a snare drum sample, and then layered on a live recording of me shaking a box of cotton buds.  I think the two sounds combined were really effective at producing the sound.  I think I will add more unrelated sounds to the video and see what else I can get away with.