Anxiety Dance- Final Mix Concept

A couple weeks has passed and I have now finished my work on the anxiety dance piece, I got the animation at quite a late stage, and due to some oddities when editing the film I had to cut to one film for the dancer, but another for the branches. This was quite confusing at times and I can only hope it hasn't come out, out of sync like I thought it might.

However, enough of that. The final mix is something I am overall proud of because it took what I did last year and really improved upon that concept, and those skills without being repetitive and boring. Once I got the edit with the animation, it was so so much easier to edit the sound to, and I found the inspiration for the piece just flowing like it usually would!

The concept of the mix relates quite closely to the Utopia I was given earlier on in the year. However, in terms of being harmonic and also showing a calm progression into mental chaos, I look at the Limbo soundtrack, which is a creepy puzzle game:

I really like this piece because it's quite calm, yet there is something off about it, and that's what I wanted to create with this piece.

I would say though, I found this piece more challenging in terms of mixing than last year as well as expanding on my skills proactively. Because of the harmonic undertone, and the plugins I applied, I think I found it more difficult to mix when there's a bass in the background, which will peak quite low. However, I got there in the end and I ended up with a really nice sounding mix. I may start to explore making tracks like this in the future, as I do really enjoy it, and expanding my musical potential is never a bad thing.

Anxiety Dance- Sound Editing and Developing Melody

Now that we are back after Easter, and the Debbie shoot is done I can now get under way with the sound design for Anxiety, as there is an edit for me to work with. The first thing I have done is matched up the foley for the film. So all the breathing noises, hand and foot noises are in place before I even begin with the melody. I have found that some of the recordings were too noisy for me to use really. On their own it would be fine if it was a narrative spoken piece, however as the dancer is wearing a kind of odd material, whenever she runs her hand over that area it just sounds like noise.

This really sucked from my point of view, as I really wanted to maintain authenticity. However. the recordings I did get were good and very usable.

Aside from this though, there's not much more I can do as I am waiting for the animation to be done before I can make the melody for the piece. I tried, but not having any timing to go if is very frustrating and doesn't get me anywhere. So, aswell as working on other things in the meantime, I have tried to explore what plugins and instruments I will use for the piece. I took a few samples and showed them to Lauren for her to listen and choose the best from:







Lauren said she preferred the first one as it had more of a melody about it. She wants to maintain a kind of harmony in the piece, whilst still having that creepiness. I think I know what she means, and I feel I will be able to work well on it when the animation is finished.

Anxiety Dance- The Shoot And Recording Studio

It's been a while since I posted for Anxiety, but the shoot was the Tuesday just gone. It went well, and it was interesting to see a different dancer's response to similar kind of direction as we gave with Parallel last year. I was there for just sound recording though, so I spent most of my day doing other work. However, when it came round to the recording I found I got some really interesting sounds, although the heating was on in the studio at the time and alot of the recordings are noisy, so I do not know how usable the recordings are. I want to try and maintain as much authenticity with the piece as possible, so losing some of those recordings would really make me unhappy.

I've also been in the recording studio recently for other work, but I recorded some sounds for Anxiety too. Laura has told me they want it kind of creepy, slightly uncomfortable to watch. Uneasy, really. So I'm thinking I'll record some foley of branches snapping, moving around etc. and depending on what I do with it I could make the branches seem incredibly menacing.

The next post from me won't be for a while now, not until I am in the edit for anxiety at least.

Anxiety Dance- Sound Design

Laura approached me over Christmas to ask if I could do the sound design for her and Lauren's dance piece. I said I would need to do a mock up of some sound design, to get an idea of the complexity and the length of time it would take me to complete the work as I'm working on other projects as well.

I asked Laura for her storyboards and some reference material and she linked me to a piece from the Utopia soundtrack that they liked the sound of for me to try and create something similar. As a starting point I tried to pretty much recreate it to an extent in order to get an idea of how it's done and then divert from it according to the rest of the film.



This is what I created quickly:


The whole process took me a couple of hours as I figured out what to start off with and overall I found the process fairly easy. I just took a few organ notes using a virtual instrument using Pro Tools and then played around with the distortion, reverb, and other sounds to end up with what I did. Although I feel like there is too much distortion on the piece, I've got the general jist of it now.