Sound Design and Soundtrack projects
The first two projects I tackled were - firstly:
A Trip To Grannies
This involved adding a sound track to a short video clip and also producing and adding sound effects for the animation.
The soundtrack is Throbbing Gristle's Hamburger Lady, I'd played it on my Radio Show and felt that the randomness of the sounds and vocals in particular would go well with the bizarreness of the cartoon clip. The music is aggressive and threatening as is grandma and her house. I cut up the track and sampled bits to use for the TV advertisement sound and for the SFx for Grannie's Zimmer frame. Many of the other effects such as traffic and motor sounds, together with car door slams, banging head, squeaky door, footsteps, rustling of clothes and sounds of the screen door crashing and flapping were location recordings at college, in the street or around my house and garden. The broken glass and fallen clock were Apple Loops SFXs
I tried being a Foley Artist and found how difficult it was to get both the timing and sounds right. These Foley guys earn their money! The voice replacement was my partner Jane, recorded in my home studio and then processed using pitchshifter and reverb.
All sounds and sound track were then extensively and intensively processed using a wide range of Apple plug in effects in order to design the sounds I wanted, including echo and reverb to give a sense of space and mood. A lot of cutting and pasting and moving took place to ensure the timings of SFXs were right. The tracks were panned and automated in velocity in order to emphasise and let particular sounds through and reduce others that were competing. All in all, a great learning experience
The second project was:
Spirited Away
Spirited Away is a 2001 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Studio Ghibli and voted amongst the top 100 best films of world cinema.
For this project I opted for a soundtrack only, using samples from Asao Timita's 70s album Snowflakes are Dancing, an Album I had featured in my Radio Show and that I greatly admired when it came out in 1974. The album the Japanese musician created used samplers and reproduced music by Debussy. The Tracks I sampled seemed to fit well with the ghostly nature of the cartoon film. Unfortunately, it hit too many copyright checks so was blocked by YouTube so I took it down - fair enough, but I wasn't trying to sell anything, just share a great cartoon with some great music and this was also a tribute to the great man Asao whose early work with samplers was an inspiration to us all. Anyway if you want to see it - email me and I'll get you a copy.