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The two minute scene I used for my film piece was the classic and untouchable final scene in James Camerons 1986 movie ‘Aliens’. If you are yet to see this then you are completely oblivious to good science- fiction film. I felt compelled to do this scene. When the task was set this scene immediately struck a chord in my head. I remember this film was the film I was first drawn into and everything about it put me in that world and atmosphere.
Firstly, before working on the musical composition I wanted to keep similar atheistic that the original score has because I especially like the way that James Horner created mood into mysteriousness and tension into terror with the London Symphony Orchestra. He evoke these feelings from the audience by using discordant pharses, suspended drones, out of tune violins and syncopated dissonant brass sections (all treated with a large amount of reverb). Having researched a little up on James Horner I came some across some interesting facts about the scoring for this particular scene on the internet. According to Wikipedia:
‘The final cue for the scene in which Ripley battles the Alien queen was written overnight. Cameron completely reworked the scene, leaving Horner to rewrite the music. As Gale Hurd did not have much music production experience, she and Cameron denied Horner’s request to push the film back four weeks so he could finish the score. Horner felt that, given more time, he could get the score to 100% of his satisfaction, rather than the 80% he estimated he had been able to achieve. The score was recorded in roughly four days.’
He earned an Academy Award nomination for his contribution to the movie. Anyway, after visiting Julio in an office hour with some well received criticisms I decided to concentrate solely on the sound design aspect of the narrative live action film project (also condensing the length of the piece). I decided to do this because I started to lose enthusiasm and creative flow around the half way mark. We came to a decision that the diegetic sound was not encompassing the atmosphere of the room or as Walter Murch coined it ‘worldizing’. The set of the scene is a large metal structure which you could imagine make sounds trail of and bounce around of each other.
I decided to revise my sound design work and found there were a few hidden movements in the visuals that I had originally missed out. So, in keeping with the ethics of mondays lesson I decided to rent out a portable recorder and do my own field recordings, which was a pretty amusing hands on activity. I preferred this aspect of sound design because today it is as easy as pushing a button and getting a sample from freesound.com it loses the passion from if you had done it yourself. It is also more organic and less digitalized. Some of the sounds I recorded included hitting the metal railings of the staircase in the musical department with a metal leg from a chair which created this incredible clash of echo and metal. Perfect for putting over the image of the Queen Aliens tail striking Ellen Ripley’s loader machine. To authenticate the sound of the loader I recorded the sound of automatic doors opening/closing running in-between each door (quite fun). I also decided to record the sound of a printer which fed me some great robotic sounds; with a little bit of compression and beefing up the sounds I found would fit perfectly. I also missed out drips coming of the Queen Alien’s mouth in my first attempt so I took the portable recorder into my houses shower room and turn the dial up a little so the shower head would let out droplets of water which sounded exactly as I had heard it being, the acoustic of the room worked well with the interior of the space ship. Im still in the process of touching it up a little at the moment but will have the finished product to show in next mondays lessons when we present are pieces.
In other related news I watched both the 15 minute original (1967) and 85 minute feature film (1971) of George Lucas’s ‘THX 1138′ to pay attention to Walter Murch’s sound design work. However, I soon found myself transported into the dystopian future world of THX which only tells me that Murch was right on the money with what he was working with to the images. I also thought the short film had a much better use of sounds and created more of a suspenseful compressed society.
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That all sounds exciting, I’m really intrigued as to how your score sounds!
THX is pretty dark and relevant viewing for anyone remotely socially concerned about our current civilisation.