Evaluation of my 3 Composition Clips

Evaluation of my 3 Composition Clips 

So, we all had to choose 3 clips. 

They were all labelled as either 'Action' or 'Emotion'

I chose two from Emotion, and one from Actions. 

Sadness, Panic, & Chase

Action/Chase Clip

For this I looked at multiple Car Chase scenes, such as:

Baby Driver

007 Spectre 

Drive 

The music for a lot of these car chase clips had suspense and full on chase music.

Because my clip was pretty much just the full on chase, I skipped any suspense stage. 

I found the Action clip to be the hardest, I found it difficult to have a constant continuation of a beat, possibly another reason why I found it harder than the others was because it is fast paced, and I usually write/sing/compose slow songs. 

Overall it was a good challenge that as brought to my attention I'm lacking in the skill to compose fast paced songs, which now means I can focus on this weakness and improve.

Panic Clip

For this clip I took most of my inspiration off of the (amazing) movie Interstellar, most songs where I can I take inspiration from this soundtrack as it has an incredible effect on me and is so intoxicatingly beautiful. 

For instance, there is a ticking in the song Mountains

It causes suspense, and it meshes so well with the organ that, as the song goes on, 

It translates suspense, and it meshes incredibly with the organ so that, as the song goes on, the both combined intensely heighten tension.

I decided to try this technique, using a ticking plugin and experimenting with various organs and cello.

I tried out a melody that reminded me of this soundtrack, but no matter how I tried to fix it in it just didn't go, Steve listened to it and said it was missing the panic aspect, which he was right about, so I decided to cut it out and possibly use it somewhere else. 

This was hard at first but eventually really helped with my creative flow.

Note to self: Scrapping ideas you're attached to can actually fix everything.

My main problem  is that I got excited with the amount of interesting plugins I found for the Space Clip to try out...so I ended up with over 15 channel strips in order to not forget where I found anything that I liked the sound of. 

Note to self, calm the heck down with the amount of plugins, I know it's exciting, but chill the heck out and choose a sound one at a time, or think of another way. Plonker.

Sad Clip 

This is clip was a little different from the others, in the beginning it has a man (Johnney Depp) and a child sitting together on a bench, after a few seconds the child asks "but why did she have to die?".

I wanted to use this because if I kept this small part it could give even more emotion to the composition. 

This one was the easiest to compose, I really enjoyed creating it, I know that with sad songs it's more common to use piano and maybe even violins etc, so instead I decided to experiment around with a harp and cello, this gave a really great airy, reminiscent feeling, which I wanted.

Sad songs are usually quite slow and progressive, this for me is easier since I have had more practice with slower songs, so it was quite fun. 

Again, I wanted to take inspiration from interstellar, I had a feeling it might fit. 

There was a melody I mentioned before that sounded quite interstellar-y, I liked it but it just didn't fit in with Panic clip. I saved the idea for later on the off chance I would need it again, and surprise surprise it fits perfectly. The melody itself is subtle, so unless you're looking for it it's easy to miss, I didn't want it to be at the forefront as otherwise it would be too much and repetitive, so I'm really happy with the end result on this one.

After this assignment, I learnt more of where my weaknesses and strengths stood, which are:

Weaknesses:

Fast paced songs 

Editing (EQ, Compression etc)

Letting go of ideas I'm set on

Strengths:

Slower, intense songs

Letting go, can be the answer to a recurring block/problem

New ideas

This has caused an improvement in these areas.

Sweet.