Feeling For Sound- Matthew Herbert

Moving on from graphical scores, I have come back round to an artist I already know and admire, Matthew Herbert. He's well known for his album 'One Pig' which explores the life of a pig from birth to plate, and much of his work focuses on attacks on the food industry, health and the problems we face in the UK with regards to that.

When looking at graphical scores I saw alot of potential there, but also see it as quite random. I also then looking at my project so far, saw it as too broad. I've decided that instead of trying to tackle multiple points in my life which changed me greatly, I'm going to focus on the one. The divorce of my parents, as it's the one that I feel changed me most in terms of my direction, my focus and my attitudes in life. It's also the one I remember most vividly. That period of my life spans a good year or so while I coped with that as well as doing my GCSE's and such.

Back to Matthew Herbert. I really admire how he incorporates foley into his music and tries to say something, or tell a story with that. I would prefer to do something like that, whilst still keeping with the binaural beats and other devices to make the audience feel emotion directly, more scientifically through sound as well as have emotion inferred through music.

Here is some of Matthew Herbert's work which gives an idea of the work I am trying to make:

I feel as if this approach will help my piece remain more focused in terms of message, and also help tell a story as it is much more easily structured, especially if I try to stick to the general rules of thumb when it comes to constructing music.

Shooting!

The shoot has come and gone! It's really weird to think that you spend all that time preparing for something, and it's gone in a flash! I think everyone is exhausted now though, and rightly so. It's been a really intense and rough few days.

I think the shooting in general went well, we got everything shot that we wanted and more. I loved working with the actors, they were very friendly and down to earth and seemed to understand what I was saying to them and wanted them to do. I still think reading those books on directing helped immensely and I really believe my confidence has grown because of doing this shoot too. The shots we got were fantastic, and I really appreciated having a good camera and lighting team with me, Tom and Shahid, who I worked with last year on Parallel. We understand each other quite well and share the passion for what we do that I really love.

There were some issues on set, mainly surrounding timing and communication. We were behind every day for one reason or another, but particularly Wednesday because we shot the masters on that day and it took alot longer than expected. However, we finished with time to get out and on the last day we finished early and had time for behind the scenes interviews and such. However, I think we could have expressed our frustrations on set a bit more. Not infront of the actors obviously, as we never would have anyway, but I think when tensions became a bit high I think we could have benefited for stepping to one side for a moment to voice concerns quietly. However, following the shoot we all sat down and spoke about any issues we had so that going into post-production we had clear air to work with.

I think this shoot and set build have taught me alot about the production process, how long things take, the needs of actors and crew and just the way things work. This is the first time I've been on the set of a 'traditional' narrative based film, and certainly the first time I've directed actors. I realise now that I really much prefer being in post-production. Some people thrive on film sets and love the stressful situations it brings whereas I don't. I wasn't by any means miserable but I think it would be incredibly difficult for me to do that for a long period of time.

That being said, however, I did have fun and there were alot of great moments on set, with some really nice shots we got to go with it. Now I just can't wait to come back after Easter and get going on the edit and sound design!

Set Build

Our set building is complete! It's really scary to think that it was just a couple of months ago that we were writing the script for this film and now we are shooting it.

Building the set was really interesting, and a massive learning experience as well as being exhausting and time consuming to say the very least. We had very little time to put the set up for starters, just three days to do it and we ran into a few complications along the way. 

On the first day we put up all the walls and put down the floor. The floor, which was one bought in the studio by another group, was slanted where it had been cut for a slanted set at one point, which made it very difficult to fit to the shape of the set, so we had to build the set slightly differently in order to fit them in properly. It did not affect the amount of materials we needed, but it took a bit of time that we did not have. Towards the end of the day, we were rushing and I was pushing to get the walls wallpapered so that they would have time to dry overnight and we could paint them when we came in that morning.

The next morning, on set build day number 2, we started painting. I had to go over some bits of wallpaper with some more wallpaper paste just to set it a little bit on the edges, but in general I think everyone did a pretty good job. The main thing today was the feature wall. Laura had the idea of creating stencil just to print on the wall, however because we put the wallpaper on before we stenciled it, there wasn't enough pressure behind it to stencil it properly and they came out blotchy or patchy. In the end, we had to have some people go round making the stencils and people following them filling it in with paint. As you can imagine this took a really long time, and we didn't finish this until day three. I think it's safe to assume that everyone was exhausted by the end of day two.

On the last day, we got the wall done by the afternoon, which was good and I'm glad we got a massive chunk of it done during day two. The last day was mostly finishing off painting the rest of the walls and then putting all the decoration and props in. I had my housemate Jess come along to draw on the blackboard we had, which looked really nice! And which we later made a frame for. I was really impressed by how the set looked at this point and everyone who came in said it was looking really good. It was not how I imagined it, but both Laura and Shahid were happy with it and so was I.

During this last day, myself and Laura also had to organise some last minute things for the actors. James Winter, who was playing Pete had just told us he couldn't get a suit for himself so we had to rush and buy one, on top of this not long before we had also had the surprising organisational task and monetary issue of finding him a hotel to stay in as we weren't aware of his location in Peterborough. So it was safe to say we were already feeling the heat of the shoot and it wasn't even there yet!

By the end of the day, Tom and Shahid had started setting up the glide cam and we had got our kit from the stores ready for shooting the next day.

Debbie- Fundraising

Whilst all the casting and rehearsals have been going on, we have still been trying to raise money for our film. Laura's workload was getting too much due to the commitments of the film and everything else, so I offered to organise the fundraising.

As well as the indiegogo campaign, and the money we were being generously given by our family and friends, I wanted to organise a bake sale and raffle, as well as organising a night at the SU. We had spoken about doing a Britpop night for a while because of our film's original connections to Jarvis Cocker and the band Pulp. So, I went to find out more about how this would work and what our limitations were.

The following is some conversation I had with Kelly Weston, the bar manager at UCA:

Kelly was incredibly helpful when it came to organising the SU night, but I had to deal with the head of catering when it came to the bake sale, and this included doing quite a few risk assessments and organising with caretakers for tables and such. However, we hosted the bake sale on the 22nd February, and the SU night was on the 29th February. 

We did some advertising for these events on the Farnham UCA Facebook page, as well as on our own Debbie Facebook page. I also made some posters for the events to advertise them more visually. Especially the SU night, with the posters being displayed around the SU:

Our fundraising efforts paid off quite nicely, our night was quite popular and was fun for us to be at as well as helping us raise money for the film. Laura supplied the music for the SU night and I supplied the cakes for the bake sale and the night, as well as organising the raffle. We managed to raise about £100 for the film, which really has helped us out alot.

Feeling For Sound- Graphic Musical Scores

In a tutorial with Kathleen, I expressed my interest in creating a visual element to go alongside my sound piece. She suggested looking at graphical scores and Cornelius Cardew in particular.

Cornelius Cardew is a compose who works with graphical scores such as his famous 'Treatise' which a massive 193 pages long of just graphical score. Graphical scores in general are a musical score which is shown in either just shapes or lines, in any form, or a combination of these things and musical notes. Graphical scores often come with instructions on how they should be played, but some pieces like Treatise is interpretive and the performer must make up their own rules on how to play the piece. I found a couple of interesting examples of this type of thing being played out:

John Teske- Six Graphic Scores

Artikulation- Gyorgy Ligeti

After looking at a few of these kinds of pieces, I have some notes on how I think I want to take this idea:

• Why do the shapes, dots, lines etc. have to represent individual notes? They could represent something like texture, which may allow far more creative freedom in the piece.
• I feel as if the pieces are often played far too literally. Following on from questioning how to interpret individual notes, it feels as if the composers sometimes drew these pieces and then thought, well what would this sound like? This is not the effect I want to create, and so I think the compositions should be far more focused.
• Is it possible to create something that sounds more traditional using this unconventional technique?

I think I should experiment with the sound at first, and then draw some things surrounding how it sounds after. I think it would be far more beneficial to do it that way and that way I can experiment with different ways of showing the sound I have created on paper.

Debbie Updates- Casting and Rehearsals

The last couple of months have been very hectic in terms of Debbie. Straight after Christmas we started casting for our film. We did Skype auditions over a couple of days and finally got our cast together:

I found it really easy to cast the guys as they were both fantastic and it was believable that they were brothers straight away. They really stood out to me and I could not have picked anyone else. I feel like we got very lucky in that regard. The girls I had particular trouble with. We had many fantastic candidates with very different styles, however Kesia stood out in particular to me because of her friendly attitude, and I loved her French accent aswell. That combined with her look really suited the kind of character I wanted her to play, whilst getting very good vibes from her that she would be reliable.

I am really happy with these guys, they are all equally reliable and friendly, as well as being fantastic actors. On Monday 15th February, we had a rehearsal with them to go through the script and play some different actions to see what kind of performances look best, try out different directing techniques, and to get to know my actors in general. 

In terms of directing technique, I have paid particular attention to 'Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television' By Judith Weston. 

I went into the rehearsal with an annotated copy of the script, which had lots of notes on how I could get the actors to play the roles and particular lines in different ways:

This book helped me see directing from an actor's perspective and I think has improved my direction on the whole. The book talks about using playable notes rather than result direction, which would be telling an actor you want them to be angry or be sad, rather than giving them something they can act on. I could see quite easily the differences in performance from one direction to another and to me that confirms that I'm succeeding at what I've set out to do. So now I feel prepared for our shoot in that regard!

Organisation wise, since Christmas it's been focused on shot lists and call sheets. Since the script is now finished, what I had to do was go through the script and write all the shots I wanted in there so I had a basic structure I wanted to work to. 

Then I had to write up all these shots into a spreadsheet with all details such as movement, props etc. So Laura could organise these into shooting schedules for each day of shooting:

In general now, I think we are prepared for the shoot. With just a few odd bits and bobs needed to do left. A couple of props here and there to get and we are set for the studio.

Other Sound Design Work- Tom & Shahid

Over the last couple of months I was approached to work on a couple of other sound projects alongside mine, Laura's and D-e3b1e.

Firstly, Shahid asked me to work on a three screen animation he is working on. It surrounds the idea of cyborgs, and focuses on particular body parts of a cyborg. My job is to create some sound design which has essentially three parts: An ambient sound running underneath the whole piece, organic sounds (or sounds of the body), and robotic sounds. What I have done so far is produce a test to get an idea of what Shahid wants it to sound like:

I did this by using raw chicken to create organic sounds, small servo motors to create robotic sounds, and a hugely manipulated sound of an underground train to create the ambient sound. Shahid liked the ambient sound, but said he wanted it louder. He wants the robotic sounds to be less harsh and more steampunk-like, and that the organic sounds should be more subtle. I have an idea of how to do this and spent some time recording things for it in the sound studio.

Secondly, Tom (an animation student) asked me to work on his animation which surrounds the idea of sleep paralysis. I have been working on this project for a while and have done a couple of different sound design tests for it. The first one was very creepy and conceptually was more about how sleep paralysis could make you feel (claustrophobic, trapped, uncertain etc.) and I think that worked quite well:

This was for his initial crit on the idea. Now he is working more towards a progression into that creepiness. So it starts out as pure foley and then works more towards that heavily manipulated and generated sound. For an edit of his animatic, he wanted me to do a bit of sound design for it. It's very rough, and has a long way to go but the pure foley I think is sounding fairly good, I just want to spend a lot longer on the 'inside the dream' side of the work:

Now I have to work towards finalizing what the sound design will be like and cracking on with the work.