Summers of Sound pt.2

Following the first piece I finished using a lot more analog processing (here) I started the summer with a huge binge of writing and recording and mixing and making a mess of all the noises I could. I'll post up a few that aren't actually online. A lot of them were jumps in different directions that I didn't think were working or were just not quite right in terms of how I wanted to present myself as a musician. They were still getting at a really warm/nonobjective sound though, and were enormously fun to work on.

(Haunted Muth) The first one that I tried to put together was a combination of different things. The first half is the only one part that I still like. At this point I wanted the cumulative project to deal with a lot of narrative. A lot of ideas I came up with had been done before, and so after cutting away more and more I came up with the idea of trying to sound reminiscent of old children's films/animations/stories/etc. This was something I thought was really definitive in sounds that I enjoyed.

These things were rife with static and thin recordings, flutes that sounded like warbling broken frequencies, all that wonderful stuff. This was also something I felt much more oriented towards, being that animation and narrative was what spurred my interest in the first place. Anyways, what I ended with was a step in that direction, but then a step back. At a certain point I believed that I needed a beat to appear with shimmery guitar. After a while, I felt there was nothing original in that, and I also believed that the chord progression was one that had been done over and over again in the past. It was just bringing up thoughts and feelings that I thought didn't belong in the piece. Alas, here it is for anyone who cares to hear.

(Wooden Fifth) After a trip to North Carolina, I found this ancient portable organ that some shop owner sold to me for 5 dollars. That built the main progression of the track, along with a few random flourishes with higher notes. I ran the organ through some effects pedals, and was also playing with a synth that I got to produce a very drifty, fake flute sound that I loved immediately. There are all sorts of other sounds in there, many of the really scratchy distorted voices were actually from friends and I playing with a broken tape recorder. The reason this one got put back under wraps was mostly the percussion. I still didn't like what digital drum sequencing was sounding like, along with not being that great at understanding/producing things rhythmically. Nowadays I have a better handle on it, and a little more openness towards digital beats. This is actually one that I've been reworking when I get the time; I've recently gotten to record with my friend, Michael Marten, on the drum set I've slowly been putting together. That is still being thrown around. Anyways, this one I felt was more a step in the right direction. Every bit was intentional, and not just because I couldn't think of what to do. I think a lot of different writers producers actually feel the same way, that a project that is done all at once and recorded in a long, unstopping process generally stands out so much more to them. Also, giving credit where it's due, this track by Freescha was a huge inspiration while I was making this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8hsXRHe_4o
Though, their method of attack at this kind of composition was much better thought out, and they actually knew how to mix/master.

(Romance of Moths) This recording was the next experiment I tried, using a combination of falling water, really delayed synthesizer sounds, and a few different guitar noises. I'll admit though, this one is a version I messed with some more a year afterwards, bringing in some more sounds that were relative to the story of it. The idea behind it was supposed to be an ode to the group of small moths that lived in my room all summer (a lot of people will cringe at that sentence). But I wanted there to be more of a character involved with the piece, so I cut up a handful of samples from a "Wee Sing" children's song tape and sprinkled them in there at random spots. The criticism I had for this one was on the lack of really... anything. There are chord changes, but the synth is so muddy that nobody would really hear them. The guitars don't really sync with anything either. Every track mixed in kind of did its own thing, and I didn't want to be so haphazard with my sounds. This is another one I have stored away in a more recent project where I've actually stripped it down some more, and reversed it on accident to produce a really awesome progression of noises

I worked on a couple of others, but they were pretty mehh. Totally different sounds than I wanted them to be. But yeah! This was a really fun time that I had to completely devote to learning how I wanted to sound with this project. Now I have music projects practically leaking out of my computer, but none of them I have been able to really call finished. I want to be out of school and in a comfortable spot before I start laying these things out and exposing them under a name. Hopefully soon...

Summers of Sound pt.1

Hey guys! I've been really busy trying to finish up thesis, but I thought I'd take a moment to talk about some more musical work I had done.

I really only started messing with music when I needed something to go along with the animations I was working on in high school. They were just really simple piano recordings, but it sparked an interest almost immediately. The first couple of things I tried kind of replicating were really lofty compositions. Stuff like the Tale of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke, and even working out the Prelude Theme from the final fantasy games. I was pretty certain that it was something that I wanted to build up, even if I only did it for myself and nobody listening. It has still been kept that way, now more so because I don't have as much time as I used to.

So I went on like that, kind of latching onto different sounds and learning why I liked them. A lot of times it turned out to be for the same reasons despite the genre, the textures and the narrative music could build. And that sounds a little cheesy I suppose, but it never left. I didn't know what kind of things I wanted to make, because I didn't know that much about music in general (at least the presentation side of things). Music has so many faces nowadays, so many genres, and even more people who are very judgmental about different genres. It took a long time before I could find something that I believed in enough to work fully on. Albeit, I did have a lot of different projects, many of which I will never show anyone. Lots of different attempts at everything from electronic, acoustic, pop, even funk. I was so excited about music, and it's weird to think about that time because the world of music was so much smaller then. The things I wanted to accomplish were so certain but daunting at the same time. Not in that I didn't think I could finish, but just the thought of having some kind of final product that I could listen to and think, "I made this, this is a world I made for myself" was so huge. And that's not too far off from how I thought about animation, but these projects were actually do-able, and not so convoluted where people could pick out what was wrong with a story, or why things didn't look realistic. Music seemed more like a pure energy that could be justified any way you made it. I mean I know now that isn't fully true, there are plenty of sliding scales of quality, but not at the time.

Anyways, the first semester of collage, I had this video project, but it was totally an excuse to create music. I was using my computer to record at the time, and still had my old keyboard. I went around getting strange recordings of stuff like printers and my roommate's sister talking. Just random stuff. I ended up churning out this:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/youre-dreaming-arent-you

After that was a year of just focusing on school. Summer hit, and I had this really wonderful time back home. It is honestly one of the most nostalgic memories I have. I spent the entire time inside getting back into music and finding the world of it had expanded to exciting amounts. I was getting much more into electronic music, and at the same time trying to achieve something reminiscent of 70s psychedelic stuff. It was a weird, weird body of work that came from this time back home. The recordings are stored away in harddrives and computers. One of those things stuck, and it carried over to the next year when we had an apartment. I told myself, "This is getting finished".

I took away the guitar parts, because I realized that I didn't have the technology to make that sound good. I still wanted the strange ambient bits, but I wanted the whole thing to be based more electronically, because that was what I knew I could finish. This was what I finished after a long time of figuring out how to compose everything, because it was kind of my baby at the time:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/the-childe-thomas

I was on a total high, and wanted nothing but time to work on music. I finished this a few days after the last:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/kindredscape

There were many others, but again, those are stored away. I only really show that goofy stuff to people I know really well. Anyways, after a while, my roommate at the time, Luis Perez, sort of out of nowhere introduced me to the world of IDM, and it changed everything. Well not everything, but I found the sound I was looking for. I didn't like anything I had recorded at this point, and realized that I couldn't work on something that was completely limited to a computer.

I researched much more about analog recording, I wanted the work to be as genuinely close to the warm aesthetic as possible. Although I didn't have an analog synthesizer, I managed to get ahold of a four track tape recorder. That was my holy grail of the summer following all of this. As the school year ended, I went back to those 70s roots, but in a different way. I was listening to very orchestral things, and strange pioneering into the beginning of electronic music. Stuff like Tangerine Dream:

and more things from the 90s, like a lot of Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin:

I was seriously in heaven. These textures and nostalgic feelings were overwhelming. I started trying to think of how I could work with these ideas, but not rip them off. I began experimenting almost every day with different things I could do with old tapes and obscuring the sounds of different instruments. It's still a struggle I'm taking on now, but I'll get to that later.

My first real break with this sound came with a recording I put together that used a digital organ synthesizer (bashed to hell through the tape recording/re-recording process) and different sounds from around my room. I also tuned down the guitar I had to the lowest note I could play that still had some sort of recognizable tone. As I transfered everything back over to a digital format, This is how it turned out:
https://soundcloud.com/wesley-cathon/the-voice-in-the-hands

It was just an experiment, and was painfully slow moving, but I still think fondly of it as the first time I generated a sound that I was happy with. It was actually supposed to be sort of a sound scape for a story I was illustrating:

So yeah! I'll stop there for now because I realized how long this post turned out to be. If you read this far into it, it actually really means a lot that you took the time to do so haha. This is a practice I hold onto almost sacredly nowadays, and will never give up recording. I'll be continuing with where the work has gone nowadays sometime soon. Thanks!

-Wes

Owl Scene

Shooting a new scene today with the little owl figure that I had posted a while ago. I also have a few new additions to the sets I'm using. One is a castle that I'm using to juxtapose over a character that will be shot outside in a scene where Fionn tries to enter under the service of a king.

And here is the open field where some of the interaction between Fionn and Finnegas (the owl-y figure) occurs:

There will actually be a black curtain over the green-screen, and the field will be lit sort of as if there was a bonfire near it. Hopefully that works... otherwise I'll have to get creative with positioning the field in front of the already made set. Which would work, I just like the idea of an open field, it adds to the kind of enigmatic feel of Finnegas.

I'm mostly posting this because I need something to do while my camera battery charges. I'm working with my own t4i today, but I only have one battery so I have to charge it after every take.

For the bonfire scene so far, I've been able to get an interesting flicker with the small, orange LED light being cast over the set. There's a knob on the side that I've been adjusting for every frame. It's been a really big hassle to pay attention to that along with the animation, but so far it has really paid off. I've been waiting to do this scene for a while, but for some reason never realized how much work it would be. Lucky me, I want to do this for the entire scene. Maybe they'll write a song about this valiant effort in lighting after I die in a few hours.

Anyways, I also finished the sound for the fighting scene, and it turned out fantastically. Again freesound.org came through. I did have a strange cache of noises from one trip out to the woods that ended up working really nicely with the stick hitting/breaking noises. so yay!

Anyways, battery's done. Gonna try and jump on as much as I can get done today, because this set up takes a while to prep/take down. YUSSSS

Inspirations

Hey there guys,

it's late and I'm just sitting around getting inspired with my roommates, so I thought it would be a cool time to post some links of stuff that I have either grown up with or have discovered recently. I won't go all out in one post, so I'll try and just do this in segments.

This is one of my most favorite animated films ever made: Ralph Bakshi's "Wizards"

This film was made with very limited resources, a really rag-tag group of animators (some of which had only just started their career in animation), and with so many short cuts taken via different techniques and animation processes that these set-backs became the aesthetic of the film. I can't say enough about this, it stood for everything that Disney refused to be. There's all sort of suggestive themes and harsh language (never getting weird with it, mind you), and the music is wonderfully funky. Someone has done the world justice by uploading the entire thing onto youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgol5_00prc


(ps. there are a couple of scenes where an army animated via live-action rotoscope fights an army of traditionally animated characters. This is the only time other than Bakshi's animated LOTR film that anything like this has ever been done. ycklutcilyfckyfclu!!!)
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Ridley Scott films! I don't think I've ever seen a movie by this director I haven't completely enjoyed. The attention to detail in the overall design and tone of his films is what makes them so great. Here are my two favorites:

Blade Runner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPcZHjKJBnE
The story alone, being drawn from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", is so great. It may not be the first time they combined film noir with science fiction, but it is something that propelled the idea into a lot of people's minds. Harrison Ford plays a cop-type character who's job is to hunt down renegade androids living as humans on Earth. As much as that description might sound like a chunkhead's ideal storyline, it is taken on in a very subtle and meaningful way. The atmosphere is so dark that you literally do not see a sky until they end of the film (referring to a scene where a bird flies away, not the crappy theatrical version ending. I don't mean to get all angry nerd-guy on this, but the only version you need to watch is the director's cut.)

and Legend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxViR7eCuM
I saw this movie when I was little, and even though it's meant to be a fantasy film, it scared the cannolis out of me. This movie has some of the best make-up and costume design I have ever seen, coupled with a great attention to crazy voice acting. The main character is played by a teenage Tom Cruise (meh) who sets out to rescue his lady friend from Satan. Yes, Satan. Technically he's called the "Lord of Darkness", but come on:

That's Tim Curry, by the way. He's somewhere under the layers and layers of latex and red make-up. So anyways, if anything, this movie is an awesome experience, whether you can stand the corny storyline or not. (weird fact, the original score for this movie was completed by Jerry Goldsmith, who really hit the nail on the head in every moment of the film He even considered it his best work. However, during the first screening of the film, R. Scott hated the reactions he was getting. Some people showed up completely stoned, expecting a kind of lush, fantastical trip. Which it totally is! Ridley immediately took it away from theaters, and approached Tangerine Dream about composing the score for him. They finished the entire thing within 3 weeks, giving the movie a much more progressive, haunting atmosphere. Both versions of the movie are open for purchase, and both are equally memorable.)

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One of the many claymations I grew up with was Aardman Animation's "Wallace and Gromit" series. I've already talked about how their animated logo was one of my favorite things to watch when I was little (again http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISaQVAYzxIs). The world of Wallace and Gromit is so wonderfully quaint. I mean it kind of has to be, with claymation you are making every single set and so the universe is only as big as you can imply it to be. However, with Aardman, they always seem to play off of how small they can make this little town of people, most of the time only showing the main characters & where they live/work. The animation has always been top of the line, along with the audio work. This is one of those companies I always keep a hopeful eye on, always scanning their job listings. Anyways, one of the scenes that I always remember is the triumphant plane segment, where they pretty much defy physics and animate Gromit making a daring escape in his bike/plane transformer thing. Not only do these movies look great, but they are so clever with all the little inventions and goofy mess-ups that they get involved in. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy9QeosTh7w

-also, with the sheep part of the scene there has got to be some kind of reference to early film chase scene. Maybe the keystone cops or Buster Keaton or something

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On sort of a smaller scale, this is a music video someone edited together for "A Little Longing Goes Away" by The Books. For some reason, this is something that has always stuck with me. It has given a bit of inspiration to both music and visual work that I've produced in the past year. It's a really great marriage of audio/video, using imagery from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and other bits of Nasa Footage to back the really airy and subtle music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-oNlYp6AeU

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This is an older BBC animation of Mozart's "The Magic Flute". I loved everything about this the first time I saw it: the colors, the design, the music, everything except maybe the goofy story/singing dialogue part (but that's an opera, duhhh). The initial scene is one that has been stuck in my mind for a long time, specifically that so much is communicated with no dialogue in this totally abstract world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7Wp3p3did4

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Here is a really great film called "Baraka" that was one of the first really visual-based documentaries I ever saw. This is one of those movies that I watch and get really pumped to go capture anything with a camera. The whole film was completed in14 months, spanning 24 countries, on 6 different continents. I don't know if I could encapsulate this craziness well with words, so I'll just post the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6tJjZpwUZ8

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I'll end on this for tonight... my teacher recently edited this video together (hopefully starting a series of them) that goes through a highlighted timeline of early film. I will admit that I have yet to check out a lot of these things, but this video alone makes me want to devote a day to investigating some of these movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVHXKzT_LB0

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Hopefully, if you've made it this far, there was something cool in here for ya! I'll try and compile some more links/info of cool projects in the near future. In the mean time, animation has been occurring almost every day. Some of it turns out really cool, some of it is shot and looks poopy, but overall this has turned out to be one of the most fun projects I've ever worked on- which it should! It's thesis! Have a good night and do cool things!!

(pps. meet Bodhmall, another of Fionn's caretakers)

super proud of this model. those eyes are nearly the size of ants. took so long to get them to look not horrifying haha

Time Paradox

I made one-

Thought the science world should know...

Finished Prologue!!

Beginning to notice all of my posts have titles with exclamation points. Whatever, I'm excited all the time! Anyways, YAY I finished the paper animation! I think this will be all that I reveal of the episode until it is totally completed. I decided to post it as sort of a self-contained promotional thing for the project.

When edited into the actual episode, there will be narration to give it a bit more clarity. I know it's not the most cohesive thing right now, but I promise it will make sense in context.

Everything in this was done with layers of cut out paper. I would have liked to use a multi-plane set up with sheets of glass and stuff to give it more depth. Alas, we work with what we can. I can safely say that this is the fastest animation I've made ever. I was able to print/cut everything out, animate, composite with some slight ae alterations, and organize sound all in 1 week. So glad I could kick this out quickly and get back to focusing on the claymation stuff. I'm not too sure when everything needs to be done, but I know it's quickly approaching. My hope is that I'll have a hodge-podge of different clips that I can just edit down into an interesting episode using the video portion to string it all together. That's not a part I'm too worried about either. Back when it was just video, we were kicking out episodes over a weekend's time.

I'm particularly excited about those birds. To get that weird video-ish effect I printed out an image of a big flock of birds flying away, and picked out 5 different birds that were in different flying positions. Then I ordered them 1-5 and switched out the different birds for every 2 frames as they were moving across the screen. Stumbling across this idea makes me REALLY want to explore it. I think I might try to find more animals to animate this way and make a kind of Eadweard Muybridge style collection of movements.

Anyways, I can't think of too much else to write about this little guy. The music ended up working out really well. I only had to transition it to other sections of the recording a couple of times, like when the battle scene starts, and near the end when the woman is in the woods. Otherwise, there were a lot of awesome unintentional music cues, stuff like the band of warriors popping on screen in-sync with those little harp strokes. I saw it when I played it back the first time with this music and nearly exploded from happy. Pretty much all of the sound came from Freesound.org. I can't express how great this site is, and after this project is done I intend to upload my library of recorded ambient noises to it for public domain use. It's the least I could do to give back to a community of people who just love to go out and record whatever random noises they think of for anyone to use. So cool.

So yeah! Hopefully you guys enjoy this stuff as much as I do, I intend on returning to this style when I get the time. Meanwhile, it's 1:33 am and I still have a paper to write for tomorrow. So I'll end it there and stop my yappin'.

(ps. sorry mom, I know I said I'd have this uploaded so you could see before it was really late at night, oooooops.)

(pps. my friend kelly made this a while back, and I feel that it belongs here)

Prologue Stuff

I'm working on a paper cut-out prologue section of the episode:

Don't really know what to say about it. It's a thing. It will be about the relationship of Fionn's mother and father, and the war in which his father is killed by Goll. The transition from this to the claymation will be when Fionn's mother brings him to the forest to be brought up by Liath and Bodhmall. It won't take up too much time; I'm shooting for around 30 seconds.

this is a superfun superbowl sunday YeEeEeAaAh!