Sound to Animation
Implementing samples into a title sequence, establishing an appropriate Tempo, Instrumentation, Timbre, and working in a a key to help promote a feeling of unease and resolving all of those elements into a track little over a minute long proved to have some challenges in its own other than finding the right plugins to use.
The Original Concept was to create a Hip-Hop/RNB track, but due to the production lead dropping from the class in week 4, we then sought out to create something a little more personalised to what we wanted to achieve from our study with the remaining members. Reminded of an animation student that pitched me a concept during orientation day, I approached him to see if we could use his concept as the character he was designing was going to have his emotions and world heavily linked to audio cues. Initially, the project was running smoothly until it came for creative input from other members, this proved to be challenging as the members where unsure of what samples/synthesis they wanted to use and even after sitting with them through several sessions and deadline fast approaching the decision was made to complete this project essentially solo.
Although the session appears tame, some of the elements within had either automation or a specific reason why they where chosen.
Lets start with some of the most basic elements of the composition.
80bpm was chosen as the tempo for the composition as it is the average resting heart rate for a person and for that reason was used to try and promote calmness but also give the track an etherial feel as its was intended that the events where held inside of a persons mind. Tonality of the instruments where designed in a way that they would sound as natural as possible or used more as an embellishment to promote messages being conveyed in the animation, such as how the piano had low velocity strikes and plenty of reverb and delay used more so to enhance some of the lower frequencies and a synthesizer to create low frequencies to build tension during the change and help fill the moments of realisation at the end of the sequence, finally strings where added during the build to create tension and even the scale it plays (Lydian) is known for being a scale that essentially never resolves to enhance the transition from struggle to acceptance. The Drums have an interesting effect used on the hats where a stereo delay was used and the stereo delay is offset to tempo for it to pan from left to right with plenty of reverb on the snare and heavy compression on the kick to add sustain to the kit and help even more to promote the feeling of surrealism.
So by the video you can probably already tell that this is still an uncompleted project in terms of the animation being finished but as with all forms of group work inevitably there will be aspects of teamwork you can not account for all be it personal issues, commitments or even just time management in general with many of the audio assets having to be linked to keyframes within the animation. Despite all efforts to help the project run smoothly with meetings and communication lanes being kept open, it is hard to account for other peoples actions and is essentially why the project isn't perhaps as polished as it could be.
Some of the events that happened during the production stages of this Project where finding time with other group members to sit and plan overall theme and collecting samples to be used as part of the sequence. This was mainly due to outside commitments and also the distance some student had to travel in order to make it to class, so arranging time via online communication and also by phone were often hindered with timing issues due to these commitments. Finalising a sequence to get time of keyframes took some time and wasn't able to be completed until about week 4-5.
As production lead, to ensure we met deadlines and being at the time the only person to be actively communication with others, it was taken upon myself to spearhead sample collection, creative direction and research in terms of finding composition methods in order to portray the feeling we were ultimately trying to achieve with this production.
As a whole the goal to create music and some basic sound design elements to be implemented to Animation was a success and once the final plan was confirmed. Many aspects of the Pre and Post production phases mostly failed due to Prioritisation of either study or time, whether it be time management or personal issues it was hard to collaborate with anyone at any given time.
Creative Process was the key word in terms of this being a successful project with the amount of problems it encountered during the infancy of its conception as everyone was eager to produce something that would be worthy of portfolio material, thing like synthesis and sampling where key as the purpose of the animation was to provide visual queues and provide narrative to the story.
Inevitably the final product was limited to the constraints of time with the animation provided so giving depth and time for people to relate to the character, and for it to resolve in the space of about 1'15" was a challenge in itself so composing a story with audio was a challenge for me in that sence as most of the compositions i have produced in the past ranged anywhere from 7-12 minutes so there is plenty of time to progress the narrative, so consolidating this took some time to arrange. The use of synthesis to create texture was a first and definitely wont be the last time I use these methods to create rich atmospheres.
This being my first real attempt at sound design I believe overall the project was a success though more time could have been spent recording more foley for the project as almost all of the samples where sourced from royalty free databases. Another things that could have been improved was the overall mix and Psychoacoustic effects making assets seemingly move through space and time.