MUSIC FOR ANIMATION: WORK IN PROGRESS

Some recent music composition for an experimental animation piece. The film is all about imagery that shifts, drifts, and dissolves. The visual presentation is somewhat lo-fi, yet expansive and abstract.

After watching and thinking about the animation, what seemed appropriate was to put together some conventional music— something jazzy and “vintage” made sense (made 100% with virtual instruments)— and then, as I often do, use the individual tracks as source material for audio collage. As ever, it’s like crafting a stained glass window, shattering it, and then reassembling the shards in some new configuration.

At this point I’ve “futzed” the sound of the music to make it resemble something coming out of an antique radio. Eventually I’ll probably add some vinyl pops to make it sound more like an old record player. I’ve already started scrambling the elements to pull a score together. It’s been a lot of fun so far.

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MINIDISC REDUX!

Recently I’ve been resuscitating a “sinner-songwriter” recording project I started almost 20 years ago. Engaging every lateral move I could think of between CPUs, CDRs, operating systems, DAWs, and dongles, I finally managed to unlock all the sessions and revamp them as projects in my current Nuendo system.

There was only one file I couldn’t find, which was a piano performance I tracked in my friend Ben’s living room, back when we were housemates. I wrote it off and redid the performance using a virtual piano, which was fine, but it still bugged me because it just wasn’t the same.

Finally I remembered that what I was sifting through were WAV files, but that the many of the source tracks-- including the piano-- had originally been recorded to minidisc. Minidisc, folks! And do I still have all those minidiscs from the early 2000s? You better believe it!

So I unearthed the boxes of MDs, and lo and behold, found the piano performance after about an hour of rifling through them. The disc was labeled and everything. I found one of my minidisc players-- my first one, not even the newer Sony that does actual digital transfer of files-- and was happy to discover that it still worked.

I input the audio into Nuendo-- complete with creaks of the piano bench and that annoying whir the MD recorder made every once in a while-- and I was happy to hear that I’d done a couple of mouth clicks to sync with the countoff I’d done on muted guitar strings previously. The session’s legacy tracks are now complete, waiting for edit and mix!

FX EDIT + MIX FOR FILM: "RELENTLESS" DOORKNOB CUE

Above: A layer-by-layer exploration of my sound design depicting a single action from the feature film “Relentless”, directed by Barry Andersson and starring Rachel Weber.

The film follows the psychological journey of a woman who winds up trapped in her basement during a thunderstorm that turns into a flood. The event depicted here turns out to be pivotal, since it cuts her off from a means of conventional escape.

I’ve broken down the sequence to isolate various sonic elements that come together to form the final mix.

The “dripping water” layer should be self-explanatory; water is seeping into the basement from the storm outside. The “production audio” segment depicts what was actually documented live on location, while the camera was rolling. The “Cut FX” pass features sound effects that I assembled from audio library assets, dropping them into the timeline in sync with the action onscreen to complement what had been recorded on set. And “final mix”, of course, demonstrates all of this as I blended it together, with a smidge of Andrew Joslyn’s wonderful score taking us out.