Star Guitar - The Chemical Brothers

This music video was directed by Michel Gondry and features a long continuous shot through towns and country sides.

I really liked this video as he has manipulated the scenes so that objects appear in time with the beats or musical elements present within the song, almost like how each objects build-up the pictures, each beat builds up the song. Also, as the tempo or rhythm of the song changes, Gondry has used this change to change the scenery within the train is travelling through. I think this is really creative as it doesn't have a narrative or storyline, just is a continuous visual representation of the music.  

Experimental Project

Our next project for this module is an experimental piece. For this I am in a group with Hannah and Ed. we decided his would be a good group to work in as we all have different strengths. Both Hannah and Ed are good at creating and developing ideas where as I prefer the planning and editing stages. because of this Hannah is going to take the role of Director, Ed will be camera operator and sound recorder so therefore I will be producer and Editor.

We meet up before our first seminar to discuss any initial ideas we all had. Ed  thought of the idea of experimenting with the use of colours and maybe a project on to a wall or certain objects. Hannah suggested that we could use a poem for inspiration and said about using The Tell Tale Heart, (Find a copy here). i really like the narrative from this poem as is it kind of twisted. If we were to use this open we will have to extract certain segments that we wish to use though as it is such a long poem, also we will have to see about copyright and getting release. we then started thinking about what words we could develop from, such as Bubble or light beams. I then thought about the idea of The Seven Deadly Sins (Wrath, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy and Gluttony). i think this could work well in with Ed idea of colour as having each sin a different colour, we could also experiment with the use of one person playing all seven sins and the seven sides of them.

Editing

During the editing stages of this project, both Hannah and I took on the editing role, taking it in turns to edit and having a fresh eye on the project. This meant that once of us had edited a section then we would both listen and suggest ways of improving it.

Here is a screen shot of the first segment as we were laying down the basic tracks that we wants in our overall project. As we were having a ‘Ticking’ noise throughout we decided to first lay these down the gradually go through and layer up the other sounds.

To make it easier to follow, we decided to colour code our tracks. We coloured them in relation to the colour on the sound plan. The Pink was the continuous ‘Clicking’, the Orange was the continuous rains sounds, the Yellow was the speech and the green were the other sound effects that we wanted to use. This made it a lot easier when looking for a certain track to edit.

We placed each of the separate effects on a separate track in Soundtrack Pro. This was so that if we were to add an effect or changed the sound or direction then this wouldn’t affect any other sounds.

Sound Plan + Call Sheet

When trying to organise our track that we had recorded we came up with a sound plan. This then gave us a basic outline as to what we wanted from our project and helped us through the editing process. In order to organise it we colour coded the different types of sounds that we were having in our piece. Such as the speech Yellow, atmospheric sounds of the rain were Orange, continuous foley recording of ticking was Pink then the other sounds green.

Here is the copy of our call sheet that we used for our production. 

Produciton

While recording our tracks we used Dynamic microphones, Riffle mic and Hydro-mic. This meant that we were able to capture a wide range of sounds to edit together to create out final piece. Here is the draft for our script and the sound log following our recording.

Dear Journal ...

When trying to think of inspiration for our piece and the style in which we wanted our narrative to say through our piece i remembered Glee. throughout the series they have a character, Sue Sylvester, write in her journal and you hear her thoughts as she is writing it. Here a copy of some of her entries:

(http://cliqueclack.com/tv/2009/10/08/the-unpublished-journal-of-sue-sylvester/)

When Hannah and I read over some of here entries, it inspired us into how we wanted our. We, like Sue's, wanted our entries made up of very short sentences. This is so that they don't go into to much entail but get across what they mean, straight away. we also decided that we would have the narration speak as if she was speak in the past and writing her journal about what had happened, rather then as if she was speaking in the present. We also had a look at Clips from Danny Boyles film, 127 Hours.

This was inpirering as he used a camera to document his days stuck in the cannon. I found it helpful to watch as this was the sort of style that i pictured out narrative to be. Talking about the past.

Ideas Development

When Hannah and I met to develop our idea we discussed the basic outline as to what we wanted to achieve. This idea is that you hear a girl talk about her day as if she is reading our her journal. we used several examples that we had seen to help describe what we were both thinking of the piece.

We looked at an advert for orange that had been on TV recently. This advert is what helped me see the style of piece Hannah was explaining. i really liked the concept of the mans voice talking then in the background hearing, in this case seeing as well, what he is talking about. i helps you really listen and experience what he is talking about, not only by trying to imagine but it prompts you to all think the same and helps you create a clearer image in your mind.