I’ve recently been scrubbing dialog, designing sound and mixing a retrospective documentary video for Liberty Property Trust— produced by the studio Equisolve and directed by Glenn Kesner. Having been acquired by another company, Liberty commissioned this short film to commemorate its legacy as a longtime commercial real estate entity.
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An excerpt from my original score on Felipe Mafasoli’s experimental film “Nowhere Left to Run”-- an abstract, associative vision of a post-apocalyptic dream world. If you’re in the Twin Cities, you can see it this weekend. The film-- which, in its final form, may or may not include this scene-- screens this coming Friday at Cellular Cinema’s Cave 4 Festival, 9 pm.
Readers may recognize the melody of this piece, which appears in different arrangements throughout the film. I’ve posted about the other versions here and here. I did my best to channel the Flaming Lips on this version, which accompanied a tableaux that evoked equal parts beauty and decay. In case anyone was curious, I dug back through the session to see what toys I used to create it.
All of the signals originate from virtual instruments. The piano is a sampled, out-of-tune “honky tonk” instrument, apparently treated only with compression and no other processing. The drone is a mandolin voice through a fuzz module, bitcrusher, another fuzz module with different settings than the first one, a whole ton of reverb, a filter to foreground some overtones, and some EQ rounding off the high and low end. The distorted bass line that comes in is a sampled standup bass through compressor, fuzz, reverb, and then another compressor.
Enjoy!
Wobbly Chutney Bowl Foley is my new band name. Here I’m trying to capture a super subtle wobble to match motion onscreen, where a character plucks some particles of spice from a similar bowl and sends it spinning for a couple seconds in the process. As you’ll see, I stuck a small folded piece of paper beneath the bowl so it wouldn’t have a flat surface to return to, and would wobble all the more as a result. I tried filling the bowl with the same amount of powder as depicted in the scene, but the fun resonance of the bowl was lost when the interior was filled up. Forget realism-- I say give the people what they want, and that is chimey wobbly chutney bowl Foley!
More sound design by Mike Hallenbeck
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