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.