Attempts At Writing Score

In my case studies I identified that writing a lot of music not to picture was a technique Trent Reznor successfully used to create his score for "The Social Network". With this in mind and the inspiration videos mentioned in my last blog post I begun to write music that will later be adapted and placed into the film I created.

Link To Created Film Scores

As you can hear the score's are quite reflective of the inspirational clips I selected. I opted to use similar instrumentation and aimed to create a similar mood/feeling; I found writing music of a specific mood and feeling quite strange, it took a lot of experimentation to find a strong or interesting melody for the score but I found that once I had one the easiest way to continue the writing process was was to basically build around the lead melody, essentially bulking out the track.

Inspiration

Today I found myself staring at an empty session file in Logic not knowing where to start when producing film score. As I directed the video I already knew the mood of the music I wanted to create so didn't need to go through the process of establishing that, however I couldn't decide how best to limit my sonic world (discussed in case studies) and found myself doing exactly what previous research said not to do; I caught myself browsing through several of the pre-set synth sounds in Logic.

Quickly realising the trap I was falling into I decided to give up on Logic for a while and take a break from the honours project. While speaking to a classmate over Facebook about the wall I'd hit they jokingly asked "Why don't you just copy someone else's music and pretend you wrote it?" 

This instantly led to the realisation that in order to create score I needed some inspiration. Suitable inspiration would provide me with something with which to benchmark my work. After sitting and considering what kind of score I was after I remembered the following videos: 

These videos are both suitable forms of inspiration for the film, they both centre on the desired themes of the video (melancholy and desolation) and a clearly distressed lead character. In the next couple of weeks I will try to create score using these two clips as inspiration. 

Logic Pro X

Today I downloaded Logic Pro X and in the next couple of days I plan on using the software to attempt to create film score using the steps identified in the projects case studies. Hopefully this practice based research will generate information the case studies did not.

Film

The past 2 weeks seem to have passed in a blur. I have spent most of my time either writing notes for my short film or contacting friends i.e. finding actors, arranging dates everyone is free to shoot etc. This frenzy of work seems to have paid off though as today I shot and edited a short film. (Using a Canon 550D and Final Cut Pro)

Obviously this quick turn around meant that I faced a number of issues, the biggest of these issues was the diegetic audio. The day I chose to film was unfortunately very windy meaning the audio captured was totally useless. As I don't have time to waste conducting Foley work (it is not particularly to the aim of my project) I have added some simple placeholder audio where it is necessary to the films narrative. As for dialogue any relevant conversations have been subtitled in.