Music For Digital Media: Memory Collection Box

Motorola RAZR2 Commercial Music

This composition is a re-evaluation of my previous attempt; I have added more sound design to the commercial and made that much lower in the mix, trying to let it mold into the background. I also replaced some of the sound design with musical phrases, which insinuate what would most likely be heard, much like the method used for scoring cartoons.  I found it hard to make the musical phrase of the company much more apparent in the earlier sections because they are so busy. I believe the interaction of both music and media develop a certain mood perfectly. Let me know what you think of the outcome! 

Incidental Music In Film

The majority of the sound design you hear, is Foley. My first attempt at recording the footsteps sounded too dead because I was using trainers and they tended to slide on the floor and trail off. Until I began to use work shoes more like the ones Ethan Hawke is wearing in the scene, which gave a more dead feeling which duplicated the movements on the screen. The same with the shuffling and the necklace movement, which was hard to mix because I wasn’t sure if I should make the sound’s much more apparent but I felt it sank nicely into the background, I had to cut a lot of high top out of the audio file. The space shuttle launch needed a little low cut also, I kept a little rumble in there because it really involved me as a spectator. Originally when mixing the whole thing, the background music was much higher in the mix but I felt that it enforced more of a mood when it settled into the background. The composition is spilt into four parts the orchestration and changes give swift changes in dynamics, particularly the launch scene. In the first part of conscientiously used and made synthesizers that reminded me of science-fiction film. The crescendo is an obvious emotional incidental music rise within the video. 

Having not used iDVD before to create a menu this was my first experience of creating one. I found a basic and suitable template which represented to me the idea of a work place, particularly a student work place. I had a little trouble finding the option of positioning the buttons when I found that problem could be avoided simply by dragging the video onto the menu. One of the annoyances and obstacles was in the size of the font for tasks. I have decided to submit my commercial and incidental music for my final non-jitter tasks which I feel are my strongest tasks. For the instrumentation in the background I used a subtle ambient piece which sinks invisibly into the menu. 

I am having trouble uploading the PDF document of the blog into the dvd menu which will force me to submit the PDF file on a separate disk which is a shame. If any one have any suggestions in how to get around this, I have searched through a few forums but can’t seem to find anything very helpful. 

I was reading an article in David Bordwell’s ‘The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960′ on how music accompaniment effects narration and this strongly affected my view on the basic principles of film scoring (it is also and interesting read.)

” From the start, musical accompaniment has provided the cinema’s most overt continuity factor. In the silent cinema, piano or orchestral music ran along with the images, pointing them up and marking out how audience should respond.”

” As early as 1911, a theater musician advised players not to stop a number abruptly when the scene changed. Hollywood composers claimed that sudden stops and starts were avoidable by the process of imperceptibly fading the music up and down, the practice known in the trade as ’sneaking in and out. This continuous musical accompaniment functions as narration. It would be easy to show that film music strives to become as ‘transparent’ as any other technique – viz., not only the sneak-in but the neutrality of the compositional styles and the standardized uses to which they are put (’La Marseillaise’ for shots of France, throbbing rhythms for chase scenes.) Thedor Adorno and Hanns Eisler have heaped scorn upon Hollywood music as pleonastic and self-affacing; Brecht compared film music’s ‘invisibility’ to the hypnotist’s need to control the conditions of the trance. Yet calling the music ‘transparent is as true but uninformative as calling the entire Hollywood style invisible. If music functions narrationally, how does it accomplish those tasks characteristic of classical narration?”

The sources of Hollywood film music show its narrational bent very clearly. In eighteenth-century melodrama, background music was played to underscore dramatic points, sometimes even in alternation with lines of dialogue. American melodrama of the 1800s used sporadic vamping, but spectacle plays and pantomimes relied upon continuous musical accompaniment. The most important influence upon Hollywood film scoring, however, was that of late nineteenth-century operatic and symphonic music, and Wagner was the crest of that influence. Wagner was a perfect model, since he exploited the narrational possibilities of music. Harmony, rhythm, and ‘continuous melody’ could correspond to the play’s dramatic action, and leitmotifs could convey a character’s thoughts, point up parallels between situations, even anticipate action or create irony. ”

Bordwell, David (1985) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 London: Routledge

Due my hard drive dying over the easter period and the believe that I could work on and produce something of a much better standard than my work on ‘Aliens’. I have decided to score and sound design the ending of the 1997 film ‘Gattaca’ directed by Andrew Niccol and scored by Michael Nyman (a composer very vocal in minimalism within music.)

For those of you unaware of the nature of the film the tone of the ending is incredibly emotional and climatic. Due to the essay below I was aware of a few techniques and hit points that I was already going to use before beginning work on it. I was attracted to work on this particular scene for the atmosphere that it creates, it is a great example of incidental music. There are also a lot of subtle drop points for the sound design, which I have had to record myself. The theme of the music in the beginning is very much an ambient  one as referred to in David Bordell’s essay, it shows the invisibility of film music. Until the middle section where I wanted to create and make the music very overtly a major part of the scene, the climatic power of music in film is very apparent here. I  will have a demo available to view up in the next few days, but I was hoping to record with a cellist to create a more organic feel so you’ll have to wait.