FINAL SCENE

I filmed the 1st scene in our film, which is the final scene to be shot, on xmas eve. A full moon was scheduled but unfortunately, probably due to mist, i couldn't see it. I filmed anyway and got several shots of the lake with the trees, zooming in and out and panning across to get some variation to choose from. We can hopefully put a moon on in after effects and make it look convincing. I filmed about 4:30pm just as it was getting dark because last time was way too dark to see anything.
We now have to create 10 secs of footage from this and place it at the beginning, then put all of the effects on the whole video.

MORE EDITING

Nicola started our second lot of editing because i was ill. She put most of the clips on the timeline in their order and sped things up etc. I went in Friday and started to piece together the 2 verses' dance sequence as these were the only bits Nic hadn't editied yet. The best takes were chosen carefully put together against the soundtrack. A lot of tweaking was done to get our lips to be in sync with the audio. It's quite difficult to edit with 2 people but we had to compromise on a few details to get it done.
Nic was concerned about her footage being too dark, i felt mine was too bright but i suggested changing the opacity and merging the 2 of us together to balance out the light. It worked well but we had to make sure we were both in time with each other and the music. The takes were pretty good really considering we were singing from our own timing as the cd player packed in. We got everything in it's right place, one problem we noticed though was that on the clip of us 'hovering' you can see the reflection of the camera on Nicola's body!! Something you obviously don't notice when you're freezing in the woods! I'm sure we can do something to alter that and if not we can just leave it out because we have footage of our legs hovering too so could use that. Another scene we decided to discard was the animation of the clothes in the woods. The lighting was poor and as we used torches, you could see the lights moving with the animation and it was obvious it was a torch. The other animations we did were great and we don't need the woods one anyway.
We have to put all of the after effects on such as the rough circular frame around the scenes in the woods to get that judderman feel and some jittery motion. We can't put the frame on in the bedroom scenes because our props fill up the whole of the screen and we don't want to lose any of our animation. After xmas we need to get a good mix on the track and place it under the video. I have to film the woods, moon and lake on xmas eve to get 10 secs footage for the opening scene. There is a full moon so i will film it just as it's going dark as it was was too dark to film before.

ANNOYED!

Yesterday felt like it was a waste of time. I was ill but went in to the lab to edit our latest footage. All of the computers had been updated and final cut pro wasn't letting us log and capture our footage. I tried the room upstairs to try a different computer but it still didn't work, Nick said only 1 of the macs was working but it was in use. He brought the latest version of final cut in for us to install. This took hours!! In the meantime Jonathan suggested we import our footage from imovie. We started to do this but by the time final cut had installed we could log and capture from the camera.
Today we were going to get the editing done but i am still feeling ill and haven't been able to go in. We must get it finished tomorrow if Nicola hasn't already. I was really looking forward to editing but at least i did the 1st shoot.

FILMING IN WOODS

We were looking forward to filming in the woods as the 1st shoot was really funny. We got all of the equipment ready and got our make-up and outfits on. We decided to do the scenes first which required help with lighting so went to fetch my niece, Leah. Nic brought torches because we thought we had a generator at uni plug the big lamps into but Nick said we don't. We could've hired one but we only found out Tues (we filmed Tues eve) so didn't have time. We changed the gain on the camera, the white balance and the shutter speed, so that we would get the most light coming through when filming in the dark.

So, we arrived at the woods, it was so dark, we found the shed where we were going to film by and set our equipment down. It was freezing!!! I wore heels too, which were really hard to dance in on squelchy, muddy leaves. We did the 1st verse dance sequence to start. We placed a few toadstools nearby and Leah held a torch on each of us so we were lit. We did the dance with the cd and went to do it again but the cd player decided it didn't want to work anymore. We tried different things but it wasn't reading the disc...this was really annoying because it was necessary for the timing of our dance and singing. We just had to get on with it, we did a lot of versions and moved camera angles so we had plenty of variation for editing. We then went on to filming the elevation scene. We crouched down and had the cam set low, we then slowly stood up so hopefully it will look like we are floating up. We then set up near a fence so we could sit on to it then jump off, we can then reverse it to get the effect of being lifted off the floor. We will cut these together to give the illusion of hovering! Unfortunately, when watching the rushes we noticed the shadow of the camera on Nic's body so that scene will have to be done again. We then did the landing, where we just jumped into view, Nic jumped off the fence a few times but it was icy and there was no way i could do that with heels on. We went straight into the dervishes scene. This was hard to do on uneven ground in heels and bright light. We had an audience at this point and loads of dogs roaming around. We did the footsteps next and had to guess at the tempo of the beat as our cd player had betrayed us. We did a lot of takes so surely there will be one in time. Next we filmed us coming down the path and dancing around the trees in the woods. We took Leah back and had a cup of tea to warm up, we couldn't feel our toes, lips or hands, or see a damn thing!

Round 2. We set up by a tree to do scenes 4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10. These were pretty good, timing didn't really matter on these. We had some lights in the background that Nic was trying to avoid but when looking through the camera i thought they looked good, like the Spinster's house in the woods. The torches were not ideal, you can see the rings in some shots but we didn't have any other option so perhaps we can make it better in post-production.

We went back to the car and got out of our set clothes into something warmer. The last scene was the animation of the clothes (we still have to do scene 1 but it was way too dark so i will go back just before dark one day, to film the lake, woods, etc.

Nic operated the camera on the tripod and i moved the clothes and held the torches. This didn't take long at all. Everything for the night was over. What a horrific experience that was!

We filmed mostly on the tripod but there were a few hand held shots, which seem to have come out well. I am now waiting for Nick to install the latest version of final cut because the computer is not letting me log and capture.

BACK TO THE TRACK

On Friday, we put some effects onto the vox. We compressed them to even out the fluctuations in the dynamics. This allows the levels to be raised. Nic put some EQ on her voice because hers was less basey than mine. We 'de-sr'ed the vox to make the 's' sounds less hissy. Unfortunately, we forgot to change the second set of vox to have the same effects so will have to do it all again!

The drum sounds that we beefed up were put onto the track and when Nic went to the Max/msp class, i got them all in sync. I find this harder in Protools because you can't zoom in as much as you need to to see the audio properly. I had to line up certain cues so did it by ear. 

We have set aside 2 nights next week to do the rest of the filming.

EDITING

Nick showed us how to get our footage from the Sony cam onto the Mac. It wasn't detecting it because the setting to HDV wasn't right. He showed us log and capture and to make a sub clip so we don't ruin our original footage. Because we had done stop framing, each frame was being saved as it's own clip in the bin so we would have had to drag each one down and there was lots as you can imagine! Nick showed us how to pick out the sections we wanted using 'now' to record and 'esc' to stop, so we re-named those and got rid of all the small frames. Nicola's got her gallery opening so she was needed there so i have edited the scenes we did.

I cut the clips of the middle 8 down to one because we filmed it about 10 times, due to laughing and mistakes so i chose the one i thought was the best. I reversed it to play forwards, it looks good because the bed makes itself in places and some of our movements have the wrong accent to what they would normally. The wolf/man in bed animation was sped up to 400% to appear smoother between frames and then rendered, i did the same with all of the other animations but had the clothes on the bed at 350% going into 200% as they disappear. I didn't think it looked right at 350, it went too quickly.  The wolf/man leaving the room was put at 450%.

With the extras that we did, i cut the best bits and edited them a bit. Nic in the mirror was reversed, cut and sped up slightly to 200%. I copied the clip with me on the bed with funny legs 3 times, all joined together and sped that up to 500%. Nic and I sat holding pebbles was cut quite short and sped up a fraction. I chose the best zoom of the doll that Nic did and cut it shorter. 

The next thing to do is firstly show Nic the editing to make sure she likes it too and then we have to do more filming. All of the other scenes are done in the woods and we have to create our make-up and clothes to look the same as the first lot of filming. There is 1 more animation scene to do, which will take longer than the rest but the others should be pretty straight forward hopefully, unless it decides to rain every day. 

SHOOTING

The first 5 scenes have been shot. They are scenes (see storyboard below) 14, 20 & 22 (which both have 2 scenes each). The first thing we did was set the scene of the Spinster's bedroom up in my room. The professional lights were far too bright for the small room, and when we closed the shutters more the light just bleached out the areas it was lighting. We tried my dimmer switch and the hallway light outside the room. None of them looked how we wanted it, Nicola wanted it to be quite shadowy so we lit lots of candles and placed them around the set. This along with the overhead bulb, which was on it's lowest dimmer setting looked good enough. In these photos we have turned the light up a bit so you can't get an accurate idea of how it looked. 

The camera was set up high for the bed shots and lower looking at the floor in just a small area for the animated leaving shots. For the wolf/man I made some ears from a cushion cover and stuffed them, pinched 2 pebbles from my Mom's garden for testicles and put my horse riding boots in the bed for his feet.  Pillows and a blanket made up his body, which was covered with a patchwork blanket my Mom made, we also covered the storage heater with another blanket she made. It all looked good. A rustic looking pashmina was placed on the storage at the back of the bed to blend with our red capes and various objects were put on top. We had a LRRH doll, 2 toadstools, 2 candle lamps, 2 trinket boxes, 1 mirror cabinet, various different candles and an Ophelia print on the wall by Arthur Hughes. The print looked good in the set with the colours and the lights flickered lovely. We had the doll, toadstools, ears, boots, sheets and pebbles animated by stop framing. This took ages as we had expected but it was fun. The best part was Nic and I doing the middle 8 bit. We made up a little dance sequence taken from our original one and did it backwards so we walked on backwards, etc. We will then reverse it in Final Cut so it plays forwards and bring a slight surreal edge to the scene. David Lynch did this in Twin Peaks;Fire walk with me. It looks weird because the natural movement of a person walking forwards is different when moving backwards so because the film is played to look forwards you don't quite know what's strange about it!

After the main scenes we were shooting, we did a few extra shots that we may be able to use. Nic zoomed in on the LRRH doll, i filmed the bed with Nic in the mirror, i sat on the bed doing something funny with my legs and we both sat on the bed holding a pebble each. Tomorrow we need to edit what we've done.

All of our toadstools are now finished and painted. I cut out the shapes of the wolf ears today, Nic and i will finish them on Tues before we start to film. We are going to set up the spinster's bedroom in mine with lots of props. We have 2 scenes to shoot for that. The middle 8 bit where we are going to speed it up with Nic and I and the ears, pebbles and shoes coming off the bed. We are going to go over to Hurcott pool, Kidderminster (where we will be filming all of the woods scenes) and maybe film the first scene. We went to final cut pro on Fri and Nick was showing us some techniques in the effects for some of the scenes. He gave us a really god tip for stop framing. We have to film for the length of the tape with the lens cap on because when we edit, each frame won't be read seperately, it just goes back to zero, so we would have problems when trying to find the scenes.

TOADSTOOLS

The toadstools have now been made, we are waiting for them to dry. Nic and I made 2 each, 2 small and 2 medium. Greg was thinking they may look small on our set but we'll have to wait and see! We scrunched up newspaper and tried to get the basic shape and taped bits to hold it together. We then layered on the paper with wallpaper paste. It was quite hard to get them to stand up but once they are dry they should be stronger.
Once the first 2 were dry enough we painted on the brown and red, we had to wait longer and then did the white spots. The largest 2 toadstools are still soggy so they will be finished tomorrow.
We are planning to start shooting on Tues evening. We will start with the bedroom scenes and if we have time, the woods scene, even if we just shoot the first scene.

STORYBOARD

The fun has now started!! Got the storyboard finished today, we have 22 scenes in total. Yesterday we were looking at different film clips and adverts to get inspiration for effects, etc. We also bought some of the set and costume. We have a red pashmina each to wear around our head and shoulders and another pashmina, golds and autumn colours, to drape on the bed. We got black and red stripey long socks to wear over black tights. We will wear a black dress or skirt and top. We went to an art exhibition at the m.a.c on folk art and fairytales. Lrrh didn't feature unfortunately but there was some interesting work.
The main advert we looked at was the old metz ad which is done with a kind of cinefilm effect and quite eerie. See it HERE. My boyfriend mentioned it and said that was how he envisioned our video from what he had heard about it. It turned out to be a good idea because both nic and i love it. It's a sort of nosferatu style too but it's really hard to stop thinking of it as being a film instead of a pop video. It's definately going to have a different feel to it, compared with other pop vids! The ad is quite jittery with a strobe like effect,which we might use and it's done in sepia but we probably wont go for that. I like the idea of using animation combined with reality; we watched peter gabriel's 'sledgehammer' to get an idea of how that looks. As we wont have time to do animation on a big scale i thought we could have the film speed up for the middle 8 when we are in the spinster's bedroom, with small movement to give the impression of us being animated. Also, towards the end, have the man/wolf leave the bedroom (only wolf ears, 2 pebbles and shoes exist of him) via animation and have the items on the bed shelf animated too. We will also have our outfits moving through the woods towards the house. This should all be fairly straight forward as there wont be any people in shot to contend with. We considered replacing us with puppets but this would take a lot longer to articulate and we would have to spend time finding and buying them.
This is our rough storyboard. We didn't have time to sketch properly so it's very amateur, yet amusing:
So the scene starts with a panning view of the lake, moonlight and woods. We then cut to my footsteps followed by nic's in the woods. We then see a quick side shot of me passing a tree from the view of the man/wolf behind a tree. The shot carries on around the tree to follow me and sees me descending down a hill.
We cut to see nic walking left and the cam pans left with her past a tree,from the perspective of the man/wolf. She passes the tree and crouches to pick a toadstool then gets up, turns and walks off the same way. We then see me dancing around a tree. Next we have a split screen of both of us looking startled at the musical cue of 'mousey ow'! There is then a distance shot with both of us dancing in the woods, apart, we haven't acknowledged each other yet, the camera slowly pans around us. We then come together from different sides of the path to meet and walk down it towards the camera. We the have our unison 'para para', which is 1st verse. The shed, which will be spinster's house is on our right. We can't shoot from the front because it has no front, it's just an old shed. We cut to my bedroom where we are walking in the door. We will have set the scene of man/wolf lay in bed, and the set is inspired by pics of the lrrh story. Our next scene is influenced with a sample, it ascends and we have a shot of our legs hovering of the floor, we then get dropped to the floor in the next scene. As we get up we are in the next shot and 2nd verse for our 2nd 'para para' dance. After improvising a bit with the movement we start to spin like whirling dervishes, into an ecstatic state. Things start to get weird and the next shot is of just our clothes moving in the woods. We cut back to the house where the ears, pebbles and shoes are getting out of bed and moving out of the door. Our clothes move towards the shed and the final scene is the clothes getting onto the bed. The items on the back of the bed are also moving in an animated fashion.
Tomorrow we are making some toadstools for the set made from papier mache (inspired by some art at the m.a.c) and wolf ears made from a fake fur, old cushion cover I have.

OVER FOR NOW

Well we finally got the Shamisen in and working on our track. We copied the midi piano track into Logic as a GM instrument. It didn't play. We tried pressing all the different buttons that we have previously pressed on numerous occasions but none of them worked. We hadn't even vchanged the piano for the shamisen at this point so it was really frustrating. We went to ask Matt. He found the shamisen on his laptop in Logic and said we would need to play it as an ESX24 instrument rather than GM. We went back to our mac to try it but we couldn't find the shamisen. Matt had to save it from his hard drive and save it on ours....it then worked!! We copied this back into protools with our track. Nic suggested we still keep the piano track there, i agreed when listening to both options, it creates a thickness and sounds fuller. So we now have a slight Japanese sound to our song, alongside weird, quirky, eerie, sinister noises contrasted with our angelic tonal voices. In other words: an organised shambles!! We are now going to leave the track and get the filming sorted. On Monday we are going to the Mac to see the Fairytale and Folklore Art exhibition, we may get some inspiration. Hopefully we will have a talk from Greg about filming techniques pretty soon. We need to create a sort of story board of events for the video. I have a location in mind already. It's Hurcott Pool in Kidderminster, which has woods and an old open shed that could be ideal. Nic and I need to go and view it together to check it out so that will probably happen wednesday. We spoke a little about effects on the vid. I was getting really funny scenes in my head when listening to one of the sound effects so we may explore that.

STILL GOING

Yesterday we continued with the track. We dropped the vocals onto protools and placed mine and Nic's under each other to play simultaneously. Our plan for today was to change the levels so we don't have any loud or quiet parts that will stand out, bring in some more sounds to fill the gaps, create a proper ending, thicken up the drum sounds and add the japanese midi instrument...the shamisen.
We focused on the vocals to start off. Nicola's tended to be louder than mine on most of the takes (i think she stood closer to the mic) so Nic lowered the gain by a few db's on her voice. It would be great if we could select both of our vox and have the db set to the same level, that would have saved a bit of time. The vox were also slightly out of time from when we put them onto the track yesterday, this was more noticeable when just listening to them with the drums. We chopped bits out and faded the ends, taking notes out of just one to make sure they both matched well. A couple of keyboard notes were detected too from playing the notes whilst singing so they had to go. There were a few low frequency sounds on a couple of the takes but we can't really do anything about them now at this point in time without re-doing the vox and there is no way we have the time to be perfecting them. Hopefully, once surrounded by all of the other noise and effects it won't be noticeable.
Nic's housemate had written some chords down that fitted our notes so Nic played them from the keyboard onto the track. They keyboard wasn't working at first and the chords were placed on by hand which was taking forever!! Luckily it went well after that. What we want to do is have the shamisen, which is a midi instument in Logic, to play where the chords are to give a nice oriental sound. As we have been working in protools though, this isn't as easy as we would like. Protools doesn't have the shamisen so what Matt suggested to us was to create the midi track first, using Kontakt, and then put the whole track back into Logic to change the midi track to the shamisen. So that's our plan for tomorrow and i hope it works.
The video was briefly discussed, i really want to get the track done so we can start filming. We don't know the location yet so i feel like we have to start ASAP and give ourselves enough time to complete it. I think we came to an agreement that we would put the shamisen in, tidy up the track a bit and then move on. If we didn't have a time restriction, we could perfect the track with no worries but as we only have a few weeks until we break for xmas i will feel a lot better knowing we have the video done, ready for editing so that can be done over the holidays. We can then do the perfecting when we get back as we'll have 2 weeks to polish up the project.

VOCALS

On Thursday we continued with the track, adding sounds we had created using different audio software. The track is now structured, more or less, with gaps left for the vocals. Our chorus is instrumental and is a sound i vreated using soundhack first and then spear. I named it tuneful box because it sounds a bit like a child's musical box. As we were playing it in the MFM lab a student popped his head round the door and said it sounded great and to keep up the good work!! We were pleased about that because we were starting to think we were going to be thrown out of the conservatiore for noise pollution as it's probably as far from classical music as you can get, and we do play it fairly loud. We booked the studio and sang the vocals again, all in the same key. Some of the notes changed slightly to fit in the key but nothing major (no pun intended!!) Nicola and i both sang each line of vocals so we can double up the track for our song. We will need to put some effects such as reverb and a vocoder just to thicken it up. The soundtrack is quite dark so having soft girlie vocals with no effect may sound a bit odd. We played the notes on the keyboard before we sang each line to pitch it as best we could. After we got the takes and were fairly happy with them we edited them and placed each of our vocals together to make sure we were singing in time with each other. We had the rhythm playing through the headphones when we sang so we were pretty much in time anyway. So now we have our new vocals we can place them onto the track in protools and get this track finished!
I brought the Sony HDV home to get familiar with ready for filming our video so hopefully it won't be too long before we start shooting.

Today we had a bit of a set back with Logic yet again. We wanted to create more tracks for our audio but every time we made one it duplicated an existing one, therefore, the same numbered tracks wouldn't play simultaneously. We looked in the help for ages and couldn't seem to find out how to change each track independently. Greg saved the day for us by creating new audio objects, which we could then re-name. The trouble we still had was that Logic was only allowing us 8 tracks and we need a lot more than that. Nic thinks it is probably because of the firewire output. We made a decision to go over to the conservatoire and use pro tools and Kontakt. Nic is more familiar with pro tools so we could work a bit quicker after the time we had wasted. I think both Logic and pro tools have their advantages and obviously their disadvantages. For example, editing in Logic is pretty easy because you can see your samples clearly and cut them with no problems. In Pro tools though it's very difficult to see.
We put some more samples into the track that we had created using spear and soundhack. Nicola had got a long bubbling sound that buils up so we put that under tha track and will probably keep it throughout, leading to a crescendo maybe. We also put in her mouse and owl sound near the beginning as the track starts to come in. My sounds were a bit more erratic and sinister than Nic's, i think she was a bit scared by some of them!! They go well with everything else we have put in so far. We started to look at the way in which we were going sing the vocals. Nic and some musicians she knows put a few chords behind the samples to see how they would sound. Our keyboard wasn't working though so i didn't hear them. We worked out which beat of the bar each syllable would fall on and how it would sound best. I thought this was a good idea but if we are going to learn it and sing it exact, and as one take, it may not sound right when it's sitting in the track with all of the other bits and pieces. I suggested we use a metronome for tempo and just sing each part so that we can chop it up if need be and place each phrase on the bar as we place them in. Otherwise we may waste time getting the perfect take as a whole and still have to chop it up if it doesn't sit right.
After this we went home to work alone. Nicola is working on some bassline sounds and I'm creating some more short 'noises' in Spear. I also had to save some of my samples as Aiff files so we can use them in the audio programmes. They weren't working before so now I've done that it should be fine.

THE WHIP HAS BEEN CRACKED!!!

Today was a continuation of creating the track. I dropped into Logic some of the sounds I had previously created with the old samples, using Soundhack and Spear. We just listened to some of them and thought they could sound good as bass sounds and hints of noise throughout the track. I could've messed around with these sounds for hours but we ran out of time and Greg pointed out that we should really be finishing our track any day and proceeding with the video! So we are going to work extra hard and fast to get the music finished before the end of the week or early next week at the latest.
Nicola and I discussed using the suit for adding effects to our track. Maybe having one arm to change effects on the vocals and the other to filter the track. We could use granulation in parts of the song and Nicola was keen on spatialisation too. This would be affected by the suit, which would then be recorded ready for the video. I think we should show how the track was created but without actually wearing the suits in the pop vid. The point of the project was to use the dance movement to create a vocal line through wearing the suit which triggers the samples. So i don't think it's important to see the process in the final product as such, but i would like to include it after the video as an extra.
I have borrowed the Sony HD camera so i can start to work out how to use it. We will be using this for the pop video so the quality should look amazing, although HD does show up everything so Nic and I will have to look our best!

SAVED

Thankfully our footsteps recordings were not wasted after all. We got rid of the stereo mic in Logic rather than recording them again with just one mic. The second mic was picking up the background noise so now that has been rectified. Previously we had changed the sample rate and normalized each one but we kept the rate at 96,000khz this time and didn't normalize them. They sound much better. We found a way of changing the sample rate in Logic as opposed to altering every sample to that rate, so at least this saved time. Wish we knew that yesterday!!
We cut the bits we wanted to use out of the samples and bounced them again. We now have part of our track up and running! It sounds great, quite quirky. The rhythms we've got are quite effective. I'm looking forward to tomorrow to carry on with it. I will post what we have so far on my next blog. We now need to record the vocals so they're in the same key and try to get the old samples into the same key ready to utilise them.

re-recording on the cards......again!!

It's all part of the process, that's my positivity talking. My negative side would say "Logic you $*#stard, and God damn the recording we did in the park!!!"
On Friday we topped and tailed the sounds we chose to use from our park recordings and bounced them. Today we put them into Logic but had to re-boot a few times to get it to actually work. We chopped up some of the best sounds and looped them to see how they would play as drumbeats. We had to normalize them first so we could see the soundwaves as they were too small for us to see where to cut. This also makes the sound louder. There were some good samples, we got a nice ringing sound off the bench to use in the place of a cymbal, a kick drum, a crunchy sound, and a few others. There are plenty of different noises to have a good variation of rhythms.
Nicola and I discussed what to do next. We planned to put the sounds into Logic along with the vocal line to see how we could get some rhythm going. We spoke about the structure of the song; Nicola was thinking of it telling the LRRH story in order but i like the idea of having elements of the story present without having a consecutive order, although we thought that starting with footsteps was a nice idea, which could start the beat off. We have the dance also, which can express our themes and we can use this for the imagery in the video. We could film in the woods, at night with some good lighting and effective costume. All of these will contribute towards demonstrating the ideas behind our project and hopefully succeed in doing so.
Post-discussion, we loaded the sounds into Logic, along with the vocal to start composing, but our park sounds were really bad. After normalizing them, because they were made louder, it also made the background noise louder so there was a hiss underneath. I thought we might be able to disguise this with effects but Nicola said it would still sound bad and if we used the sounds we hadn't normalized they would not only be too quiet but the fade in and outs sounded weird. This was something to do with the quantization. So our best solution is to re-record the sounds again, using one mic. We recorded in stereo before to get a whole sound but if we use just one we will have less road and background noise. So that's our next meeting planned out.

FOOTSTEPS IN THE PARK

Yesterday we discussed doing some recording for the backing track to our song. As we don't have any specific rhythm I thought we could use footsteps and the sounds of leaves. It would be cool to create different types of sounds and create the rhythm section from that. Nicola suggested using a Japanese instrument called a Shamisen, which Logic has as one of the GM instruments.We got the recording equipment and Jonathan helped us set it up. We didn't have enough batteries charged so just plugged it in and set it up ready for tomorrow. One of the channels that the mic was plugged into wasn't working. We thought it was the lead at first but Jonathan tried the different inputs and leads and it was the input socket.

Today we had all the equipment set up: recorder, gunshot mics, headphones, leads, etc so we went straight to the park to find leaves.We recorded footsteps on the path, slightly gravelly, on the grass, on leaves, fast and slow, tapped out a rhythm on leaves with a stick, scraped a twig across a steel bench, shook some branches and recorded a bird in a tree. There was a bit of a problem (as always when using Logic) with a stereo/mono conflict when trying to import the audio. As we heard the sound it was playing in half speed. They were being read as 4 tracks as opposed to 2. Jonathan changed the first 2 tracks to 'unused' and the second 2 to left and right. This still wouldn't work so Nicola fiddled around for a while. She converted the sample rate to 44.1 khz, almost half of what it was and it then played at the correct speed. Well done Nic!!!! We hadn't encoded the files before recording so apparently, that's why we had the problem. As this was time consuming we will bounce the tracks tomorrow.

BACKING TRACK

Nicola and I discussed ideas for the music behind our track and video. It would be good to use the format of the LRRH story so we have crackling of twigs at the start, representing LRRH walking through the woods, etc. and birds cheaping at the end to symbolise a happy ending, that of enlightenment with sounds that are bright and sunny. We planned on getting these sounds from the original samples that were spoken and using various programs such as Spear, Soundhack and Logic. I want to use some of the words onamatopoeically, to bring even more sense of unification to the project. Words like 'conspired' can be used as a whisper too to mimic the action. This made us think of witches, which then brought me back to the Ganguro girls....another type is a yamanba (mountain hag) so we could look up japanese music, film, folklore, etc for extra input.
The length of the song should be about 3 mins for a decent length and the structure could maybe include 1 min intro with sounds collecting the ideas of the story together, 1 min vocal line (we could split this into 2 verses, 30 secs each) 30 secs for the chorus, which will be made from the original samples or possibly mix around the vocal line and 30 secs for the ending. We agreed that the vocal line will get re-recorded.
We went to the IMAC suite at conservatoire to use the music programs. We worked independently for a change to see what we would come up with for different parts of the tune

Firstly i worked with Soundhack and took each sample individually and play with the effects. Once i had saved a few that i liked i put them into Logic to play them one after the other. One of the samples came out really well, like a deep long growl (the wolf!) even though my story has a man instead of a wolf i see the two as the same thing. I layered some other sounds on top of the growl and saved the line. I then got Spear up, which is fantastic for film music in my opinion. This is one program i will definately use when making films. You load up your sample, which looks like a load of small chopped up lines. You can then chop bits or chunks out of it, timestretch it, change the frequencies, overlap them and all sorts of brilliant things. I really enjoyed working with the different audio programs today and will continue it tomorrow. Nicola and I listened to what each other had come up with and were very pleased. To see the video of our completed dance triggering the samples look HERE.

BACK TO LOGIC

We had planned to record the vocal line today and needed to get our samples back into logic to do so. As usual it never ran smoothly and we had to turn to Jonathan Green for help to find out why we couldn't record. We had to disconnect the wire (in logic) going to the desk and put it into the sequencer instead. Once it was working we recorded the dance three times. All of the triggers were activated with each sequence, even if they weren't in the same order every time. I think every time a move is made, the slight difference in it the next time it's performed, triggers off a different sample first. It all depends which sample gets in there first. The elbows and shoulders are the most common because if you move your elbow it moves the shoulder so it's just chance as to which is activated first. To do the same effectively in real-time, with accuracy, we would have to get rid of probably half the samples again to ensure that only 1 sample will be played with a particular movement. We could do that for the video project also but it doesn't really matter if the samples are slightly different. We are going to choose one of the takes tomorrow and perhaps re-record it with new vocals.

WEDNESDAY

I spoke too soon on my last post..so today i'm writing in grey to reflect my mood!!Just when we thought the suit was becoming our friend...it turned on us. It was Nic's turn to wear it and as she was going through the dance, we were getting a different outcome. Sometimes the same samples were being triggered but sometimes not, unlike yesterday when it was pretty repetetive. So, i thought it may be due to the fact that i was wearing the suit yesterday and therefore, performing the moves slightly different. I put the suit on, we calibrated it but the same was happening for me too. We also adjusted the suit with the key to make sure it hadn't become loose over the last few weeks. Perhaps each time we calibrate we are going to get a slightly different result. The battery then died on us so we had to go back to the lab.
There were a couple of videos on the net of the midi suit and what people have done with it. Their projects appear to be a lot less complex compared to ours. They have very few triggers and repeat the movement a lot whilst having a backing track that gives most of the effect. Of course, we are not trying to just 'punch' a few effects out of the suit but are working to create a song, which is connected with a 'non-simple' dance.

CONDENSING

The first thing to do today was to change the values on the 16 channels of midi on the max patch. Max is so annoying though, when we opened it up and moved the suit it decided to play the samples with loads of delay which we hadn't programmed!!! We shut it down a re-booted and it worked fine. This has happened plenty of times where it just freezes and has to be shut down. The channels previously had 8 samples on each one but we halved that so there is now 64 in total as oppopsed to 128. Also, after checking the patch that tells us what actions the midi suit is picking up, i thought we may as well delete channels 7,8,15 and 16. We now have 12 channels. 16 wasn't actually picking up anything and the other 3 were not needed so by narrowing them down we can gain more control over our output. The wrist actions: flex and twist, get a bit muddled so we have not put any samples to be triggered by the twist action. We chose 12 of our favourite samples and placed them: 2 on the flex of each wrist (down and up), 2 on each elbow for x and y movement, 2 on each shoulder, also for x and y.
These were then tested wearing the suit, with the dance we made last week. As we had expected, the same samples were activated (most times) with each full sequence. So as i was dancing i could sing what was coming next. We were extremely pleased with this and the thought of having 128 samples now for the vocal line seems ridiculous!! The samples that we had mapped and were not picked up with the dance will be taken into consideration for the 2nd part of the dance. We have just repeated the dance on the other side of our body for now and hopefully this will activate the other samples. I wanted to keep the sequence simple and re-use the material where possible so repeating it with a slight change fits in with what we have done with our audio. If the samples are not activated then we can change the movement to do so. The first part of the dance came first and determined the audio, (within limit as we had narrowed down the options) and the second part will be choreographed to trigger certain samples. The dance has created the vocal and the layout of the samples will now create the movement.
The samples we are not using will be utilised in other ways. Nicola and i discussed the programs: spear and soundhack, which are great for messing around with our samples and creating weird stuff for our backing track. We spoke about taking sections and working on them individually to see what we come up with.
So, to summarise for today, we have narrowed down our samples to our favourites, which has also eliminated wastage. Previously, we had 128 and as we were playing them in mono, 1 voice only, the ones that would have been triggered if the sample could have been interrupted, were lost, so may as well not have been there. More samples are needed when working in poly with more than one voice and they overlap. We may use these in part of the song but for the actual vocal line our 12 samples are plenty. The dance and the suit are now starting to work really well for us and doing almost exactly what we had anticipated. It's only through using Kontakt i feel we have really started to get somewhere now. We have come a long way to get here but having our samples in Kontakt and being able to manipulate them easily has really started to bring the project on. I'm feeling really positive about today.
Tomorrow we are testing the second half of the dance with the suit. When this is complete and we are happy with our control, the next event is to record the vocal line. We may re-record the vocal again once we have the structure. This is to make sure that the vocal is one take as opposed to 12 separate samples and to get them all in the same key, tone, etc. We can also double the track up by using both of our voices.

Our samples have been put into Kontakt now, Jonathan suggested that we would get more use out of this program now that Logic has done it's job. The viewing and mapping of the samples are now a lot clearer.We listened to the samples individually and deleted the ones we thought were boring because we don't need 128 for the movement range we have with the suit. Maybe if the suit was full body we could utilise them all.At the moment there are just too many per action and it's sounding confusing when the voices are overlapping and when they are just mono and playing alone, the movement does not trigger another sample so they may as well not be there.
Next we stretched our favourite samples so they would be triggered more times, although thinking about it, if the samples are going to overlap slightly we could have some blanks so the whole keyboard is not full. This way of mapping is so much easier than having to re-map the whole suit but if we get the samples down to just the best ones, we can then map the suit so we have complete control over each sample. We could have just 4 samples per action, there are 16 channels on the suit so that would give us 64 samples, which i think will be plenty for the vocal line. After stretching the samples, we had to delete them and just duplicate them instead because the pitch had changed.
There is so much we can do with our project, We have to continuously make judgments as to what will work the best. We can only do this through experimentation, which at the moment, is leading us to some good ideas. When we were in the max class on fri we heard the samples through the speakers and when they were played to overlap, we got some nice harmonies. We could use this to our advantage when choosing which samples to keep and where to place them on the suit. Some of the samples clash harmonically so we must bear that in mind too. There are a whole load of effects using max as we discovered in the class too. I had some samples triggering off my left arm and altering the way in which they were played with my right arm. This is great for live performance because the audience can see and hear what you are doing.As we won't be wearing the suit in our video this may not be as effective but we could still use the effects in other ways.
We need to choreograph the rest of the dance and see how it works with creating a tune. We can manipulate the sequence once we have a basic structure to get the best result. We are using full body movement even though the suit is upper body. By using both we will have direct and indirect instruction. The upper body is primary and the lower secondary. For example, a leg movement may finish with a hip movement ,which swings to incorporate the shoulders, thus sending the signal.
Tomorrow we need to test the dance we have so far to see what order we have the samples playing.

CHOREOGRAPHING

Well, we are finally at the choreography stage....yipee!! Although i do think we may have to re-map the suit still. When we listened to the samples through the midi suit and after changing the patch to allow the samples to play without interruption, we realised that we may not have to re-map the suit. By the time one movement is complete, the first sample that was activated is the only one to have been played. This may, however, cause us problems with the activation of the other samples but we will have to see how many are triggered with the movement we do.
We began to choreograph the para para sequence. I don't want it to be like a conventional pop style dance or as cheesey as the Ganguro girls' dance so i am basing the movement with aspects of the Little Red Riding Hood story in mind and creating some contemporary/quirky sequences. We need to keep the dance fairly simple for a few reasons. Firstly, Nicola has never danced so it would be ridiculous to choreograph a hard sequence and expect her to learn it well. Secondly, we need to perform it in unison like that of the para para so keeping it mostly simple will allow us to perform well. Finally, the movement is predicting the order of the samples so complex movement is not needed and will affect our control. I recorded the dance sequence we have so far and can be viewed below.
Nicola and i discussed a little bit about the actual video. We thought about having some text projected onto us, the LRRH story that we abstracted to create the vocal lines. I want the dance, song, music, video and costume all to be connected and interdependent of each other.

MY FRIEND MAX

We had some problems getting the midi suit working today but found out it was due to a button being pressed in on the firewire!! Nicola wore the suit today. The samples sound so much better now they have been re-done...very harmonic. The problem was, though, the samples were cutting each other out. Even though we have the max patch set so each one plays for 4000 ms, this only enables them to play if it's the only sample being activated. So because the suit is mapped to pick up, say 7 samples per twist of the wrist, they are stopping each other when the next one is switched on. Re-mapping would help to some extent, which we had planned on doing for more freedom of movement, but not enough for each sample to play fully. So it was back to Max to create another patch in which we had to give a message to tell poly to be mony. Patch will be put here....
Tomorrow we have to find the best way to re-map the suit. We can switch off some of the smaller movement samples like the wrist but we still have to place them somewhere else so maybe on the shoulder, where we have the least control, may be the best place.

RE-RECORD

We booked the recording studio and live room again to re-do the vocals in pro tools. Firstly, the existing samples were re-written on paper in their new sounds. So the ones we reversed and chopped, etc. were written as best we could understand them. We came up with some interesting phrases! The full set of 128 new samples can be seen in my googledocs here. (....to come...)You can compare them to the original text we used written in colour below, to see how they have altered.
As the original recordings were spoken, we decided to sing the new ones using notes within the major scale and over a couple of octaves for variation. I used a keyboard in the studio for pitch. We bounced the tracks and saved them to the external hard drive. When we put these into Logic, and re-map the midi suit we should be able to get the result we require: to manupilate the samples and get a tuneful result!

DECISIONS

The suit is working fine with the samples in Logic Pro as is pictured above with Nicola and myself. The decisions now have to be made about how to get the samples to sound good when constructed. I thought it would be a case of using effects and autotune to do this. We thought maybe that if we section each of the 128 samples into 8 (octaves) and pitched them to a major scale, using the pitch correction plug in it would solve our problem. Then have the scales ranging over 2 octaves (split the keyboard into 2 sections) and this would give us enough variation to create a song and sound melodically correct.The problem was that the result sounded too computerised, which we didn't want,.as autotune usually does when it changes notes drastically.

We started to think that it might be useful to re-record the samples. So we could do 128 replicas (1 for each sample) but within a major scale. They would all fit in to the same key then and by singing them, the result would be more tuneful. Also, some of the existing samples are quite short and quick and although we do need a contrast, i think the new samples should be more sustained to give the ear a chance to hear them clearly before jumping to the next. Another alternative, suggested by Lamberto, is to time-stretch some of the samples. When this is done over about 1/2 a second, it's unnoticeable, obviously if we stretched it for longer the result would,again, sound very computerised.
Even though we are creating new samples, the existing ones have not been useless. When we heard them by using the midi suit, we got a nice sound when the setting in Logic was on poly. This gives an overlap of each sample, rather than seperate when heard in mono. We could use these samples for an instrumental part of the song or maybe the middle eighth. If we autopitched them to the same key as the new samples, we could even use them as a backing track. The computerised sound wouldn't matter then because we are hearing a conglomeration instead of an individual sound. The movement would be quicker from the midi suit and less contrived.
The midi suit needs to be mapped so that we get a larger scope for activating the samples between joints. At the moment there are, for example, seven samples playing just from twisting one wrist. Although possible, it's extremely hard and time consuming, not to mention restricting choreography, to master what each tiny movement activates. So by re-mapping, we can transfer say those seven movements of the wrist to maybe connect to just 3 sounds. So along with making the samples longer and the midi suit less 'sensitive' we should have more room to choreograph our tune!!

ALL VERY TECHNICAL

On Monday the audio files were copied and saved into Logic. We thought there might be a problem as we couldn't copy wav files before but we just dragged them over and it worked! So each file was placed onto the keyboard in the program. Some of the samples had to be set into the correct key range because when we copied them over, starting with the note C1, some went off the keyboard. When they were copied back on, the notes were really low, so that had to be fixed. We had a play around to see what effects we could use but Nicola thought it would be best if we got the samples into a sequence first, using the midi suit, so we would just put effects on the final tune, which i thought made sense. We can then use the granulation effect in max/msp, which sounds great.
On Tuesday, we had to build a patch in max/msp so that our audio files could be understood and the midi suit could manipulate them. With loads of help from Jonathan, we achieved this! First we adjusted the suit to fit me correctly. It had to be calibrated to make sure the movement was picked up correctly and that the readings didn't go off the graph. We then created the patch: (click pic to enlarge)



We saved the audio onto Logic via an external hard drive as we used a different Logic program yesterday so it wasn't saved on this computer. There was a problem with the suit operating not only the keyboard but also the volume and panning because two midi inputs were being read so Logic express couldn't distinguish between the two. Logic Pro can tell the difference between the midi input ports so tomorrow shouldn't be a problem.

CHOPPING

We had the laborious, yet fun task of chopping the audio up into 128 different sections ready to use in Logic. We did try to use Logic to cut the file but it didn't seem to want to import the wav file we had bounced yesterday and saved on an external hard drive. Logic is good for midi rather than audio so perhaps that's why. So failing that we tried Spark xl. This program wouldn't display the edits on the screen so we decided to use pro tools again as we did yesterday. This worked very well. It was just time consuming to choose 128 sections that sounded useful to have as our sound scale, which will be re-arranged by using the midi suit. We took random sections and listened to them just to make sure they were useful but we didn't want to be to precious about it because they're going to sound completely different with the various effects we will put on them. Also, if we had been too picky the time taken would have doubled.
Some of the sections were reversed and it was interesting how it affected the diction. Depending on the words reversed, we got German, French, Spanish/Italian sounding language as well as just sounding like English played backwards. The new files were saved on the hard drive and will have to be bounced individually.
So, the next plan of action is to make the most of the audio files by changing them with effects, such as reverb, autotune, time stretch, etc. Once this is done we can wire the midi suit up to trigger each of the128 files, by moving different parts of our bodies. When we get a good sequence, with great skill and memory.... we can remember the movement pattern, which will then become our para para dance to perform in the video! The dance will reflect the sound and vice versa and should bring an unconventional element to the pop genre ideal.
I attended 2 lectures with Jonathan in max/msp, a little hard for me to grasp after the first lecture as my brain doesn't tend to process technical info quickly! The practical class was more appealing to me; we got to mess around with the mixing desk and learn about the acoustics of the recital room, etc. The reverb and effects we applied to the sound input (from the piano) were really exciting and i'm looking forward to using them in my own work.

RECORDING

I got a good introduction to pro tools today as Nicola had used it before and we decided to use it to record with. Taking the Little Red Riding Hood idea, I copied the story I had previously written, (just on good old fashioned paper) ready to take into the recording studio. Nicola and I chose to extract words or phrases from the text, that we liked and were a summarisation of the ideas behind the story. We then ended up with a shorter story that didn't make much sense as a whole, which was fine because we plan to chop it up anyway. It looks like this:

Once upon a time unsatisfied with previous lovers seek knowledge rightful path she became distracted tempted by a tall dark handsome green-eyed stranger life long passion to re-invent men his wicked way the horny male arrived feel to force gagged gigolo conversing when we're done instantaneously after ejaculation dirty deed little red riding hood had anticipated females conspired then castrated testicles pebbles afoot sinister cackling awoke brain removed hermit practice tantric sex wise old spinster

We set the desk, speakers and microphone up. We only needed 2 speakers rather than 5 that were set up so changed the 1/0 settings to 'stereo mix'. We checked the levels to make sure we got a good sound by going next door into the live room where the mic was. The sample rate was set to 48khz and bit depth to 24 bit, this is dvd quality so would be great for what we needed. We did 4 recordings, 2 for each of us. We spoke the first one just in plain story form. We then made the second one more dynamic, I wanted to get as much variation in the vocals as we could so we would have a good basis to work from. After recording, the first vocal was slightly louder than the other 3 so we normalised it to take out any extra loud bits and brought the gain down to lower the levels . The other takes were fine so we chopped the beginnings and endings off (where we were speaking to each other before and after takes) and pieced the 4 together to make just 1 audio file. We then bounced the file and saved it on Nicola's dard drive. Tomorrow we are going to use Logic to chop up the file and re-arrange it ready to use with the midi suit. I haven't used Logic yet so i will know how much we can actually do with it once I've had a play with it.

GENERATION OF IDEAS

Today turned out to be very productive. Greg, Nicola and myself had our 2nd meeting, which produced a large amount of ideas to work from for our collaboration project. I had initially been thinking about using the Nexus to record data of live movement to then produce a secondary visual of some sort, to run side by side. My other idea was to make a pop video but i hadn't really thought about how and I also had the theme of Little Red Riding Hood playing around in my head for possible use. I re-wrote the old fairytale in my own style, which can be read on Google docs here.




To get random ideas to work with, Greg Googled some words to see what came out. Nicola thought of 'cats eyes', which brought up a lot of different subjects including Anime. We got on to the topic of Anime porn and Japanese culture and how some of the girls are constantly re-inventing themselves such as Ganguro girls (as pictured above left). These girls seem to dress to rebel but do it to fit in, which contradicts the whole idea of rebelling. They wear dark foundation and highlight their eyes, mouth and nose and colour their hair. They perform dances that are done in unison in large groups called para para. All of these ideas lead us on to the pop video idea but to maybe do it in Japanese. Nicola and I went off to discuss this.
We finally came up with the idea to create our own unique pop song, which we could present within a video. We decided not to do it in Japanese, but in a sort of computer language generated through data, received from movement. The movement would come from the overall theme of the project, which comes from the Ganguro idea along with red riding hood and Anime characters. The R. R. Hood story fits in with the idea about the Ganguro girls wanting to re-invent themselves. It's a story about change and we could maybe base our characters on her in an Anime style and come up with our own image. We are unsure of what programs we would need but we want to collect data from the movement, which can be put through some sort of generator to create random words and audio, So everything comes from the same source and each element is related, therefore is the same thing but performed in different ways. We thought the Nexus would be able to pick up enough movement for us but after reading the handbook we realised the sensors only monitor skin temperature, blood flow, etc as it's a medical piece of equipment. After speaking to Greg and Jonathan about this, they suggested we use the midi suit. This will record movement and produce the data we require for our project.
So, the collaboration idea has started to come together in which we will attempt to devise a 'dialogue' to use in the form of lyrics and music, created from a dance sequence and presented as a pop video. The use of music programs such as cubase may be useful for auto-tuning to get a more conventional sound. For example, if we put the data through a program to create sound, to turn it into a pop tune, we will need to follow certain rules such as having it all in the same key. We will film our rehearsals, which will be shown as short clips on here and youtube.We now need to play around with the midi suit tomorrow and find the appropriate programs to utilise that data.

Saturday 29th Sept

Took a few pictures today with my Premier 6.0 mega pixel camera. I've had a play on Jasc paint shop pro 9 just to see what sort of things i can change to alter the photos. I used various effects along with the random button to vary the outcome, and decided which ones looked good.

I used the pic of my niece's dirty feet! She was asleep at the time. They were the focal point in the room so i thought i could exaggerate that by creating a frame for them. They were also fairly easy to work with because they are quite a large subject as opposed to having small, fiddly details to work around. The effects look quite trashy and boudoir-ish but i kept the feet quite raw to keep the contrast between them. I need to have a lot more time to play with the different tools to get the most from it.

Friday 28th Sept

I went to enroll today but no-one was there so i have to go back Monday! I put my name down to do Subjectivity and Art, i think this will help with becoming a better performer and maybe give me new ideas and perspective when creating work. This time slot clashes with final cut pro and the 2nd class has now been changed to a thurs. It's going to be a bit of a struggle to do that class but i have a friend who i think is experienced in F.C pro so i could get extra help from him.
I'm sitting in on Arts and new media, this will be really useful for getting to know what technology there is out there and how to use it. I'm using my camera tomorrow and want to try to work out how to put some effects on the pics. I dont have photoshop but i have jasc paint shop pro 9.....not sure how good this is, so i will hopefully be posting some before and after shots on Sunday.
I have downloaded Mozilla Firefox so will use that instead of internet explorer. Tried to find Photoshop for free but no luck!!!

INTRODUCTION MEETING

Thursday 27th Sept 2pm
Met up with Greg, Mike and Nicola. Greg helped us set up accounts with Googledocs, Googlemail and Google calendar. These will help to keep communication easy within the group and also, docs can be used for word documents and can be accessed on any computer. We set up a Blog(which i'm using now!!) and this will serve as a diary for my thought process and everything related to the course.
I now have a Flickr account and will use it to upload any images i take as well as uploading relevant pics to my Blog. Greg asked us to upload some pics to Flickr before we meet on Tues at 11am, so i will be taking my camera with me everywhere, hoping to spot some good opportunities to use it!!
We had a look at the equipment available to us and i'm really excited about getting to use the video cameras and edit my own footage.
Nicola and I will be collaborating on our first project, we will meet next week to discuss this. In the meantime i need to register for the course, read the handbook and decide which modules i want to do.