Week 2 of this topic was compositional techniques #1 and it taught how to plan out the ideas and strategy’s required for music creation. I was shown the composition of Peter and the Wolf and how different characters had a different theme and instrument. I feel like this could be used in my production of the unravel video for how the red character runs into some not so friendly obstacles. I can also see how this is incorporated into film with a example being Darth Vader and his little theme song in Star Wars. This week also discussed inspiration and how I can incorporate this into my assessment, for me being so fitness orientated I related a lot to the Nike video and as I do a lot of running myself I am inspired by what I listen to while I am running, which is mainly Drum & Bass (Netsky, Chase & Status, Pendulum etc) so I plan on recreating the feeling I get while listening to D&B while running. As recommended, I watched each video muted as to get some ideas for a direction I could go, my notes are shown below:
As shown on my notes I need a better plan for the walking dead video. I have just found it hard to get inspiration from a show I have never seen. I started looking for sounds, samples and some loops to use for my assessments this week and I found some really good ones that come royalty free on splice sounds. I plan on building on these as the weeks go on but this is a really good start as I will modify them to suit what my plans are for each assessment. I had one issue this week with the Nike ad as I wanted to keep the Kobe parts at 120 BPM with a heartbeat over the top but I had plans to create a Drum & Bass beat as that is what inspires me while I am running. D&B beats are normally 160-180 BPM, so I had the issue of changing the BPM throughout the middle of the video. I was unsure if this was possible but with some googling, I found out it very much was within Ableton and I fixed this issue.
Another activity we did this week was analysing Hans Zimmer quotes about the Gladiator theme song. I thought this was useful as it gave me the ability to look into the techniques he was indirectly referring to and see how I could possibly use them for my work. It was also valuable for me as I don’t really watch movies at all and it has been making me think in a way I wouldn’t have normally and it is also interesting to see how these big movie soundtracks have been made even though I haven’t actually seen these films.
This week I also started finding the sounds, samples etc which I wanted to use for my assessment, Splice Sounds has been a massive help with this process and has also gave me many ideas and directions I can take these three videos. I also created a Drum and Bass loop using these samples in which I will build on and add effects but it is good to have a solid start. A recording of this loop, recorded on my mobile phone, is provided in the link below:
I will continue to work on my assessments over the weekend in my spare time.
Music weekly blog 