This week 15 – 21 September I’ve been working on the soundtrack for the first time. It’s been an interesting process.
I put a rough version of the soundtrack to the storyboard and they began to differ on certain points like timing – sometimes the storyboards were right, sometimes the soundtrack was right. Even the story beats themselves started rapidly changing. It was like I’d poured three separate ingredients into a bowl with one another for the first time and they’d started an energetic chemical reaction amongst themselves. All I could do was keep making tweaks, keep rewriting music, paddle out into the surf and hold on tight.
Now that I’m doing a story reel with music – even rough music – it’s coalesced into something much more exciting and concrete. But of course the original anchor idea – Pointy stubbornly won’t leave Gronky’s shadow – is still the driving joke. Following the classic cartoon short plot formula of “set the stage then unleash the gags”, it’s still Pointy staying in Gronky’s shadow which drives the funny.
So. The soundtrack. If I ever do another music-driven cartoon – and I hope to – I’ll make a point of boarding and soundtracking simultaneously once the story beats are done. Even if it’s just an arrangement with rough instrumentation, it’ll be something to break up the monotony of other production tasks.
Composing for a music-driven animation is unlike pretty much everything I’ve ever done before – but I’m adapting. Last Sunday I spent the whole day doing an analysis of 1931’s “Smile Darn Ya Smile!” to see how it used tempo changes, motifs and rhythm; this week I’ve been looking at “You Don’t Know What You’re Doin’!” and I’ve posted my musical analysis of it online.
I’m writing a very bare arrangement right now with instrumentation that has the appropriate timbre and rhythm. Still very quick to change stuff around if some part throws off the timing – something might come in too early, stick around too long, overlap some part that it shouldn’t, etc.
My current composing-and-storyreeling workflow is something like this: I write something in Reaper (my multitrack sound editor of choice), export the result out so that I can re-time to the music in Blender; or I find something that’s suggested in the music but it isn’t timed that way in the boards, so I move stuff around in Blender instead. If the boards are really off (the images themselves are a few months old), I’ve been doing a temporary overlay in Krita. For instance, there’s a certain sequence where Gronky’s facial expression doesn’t really logically follow from the previous shot – this is because I’ve brought it ahead in the sequence of events for convenience.
So lots of bouncing back and forth. I’ve got no idea how it was done in this old days but writing the visuals and music in the rough like this is working nicely.
Moviewise I watched “Superman” (the 1978 movie) and David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”.
I don’t like modern superhero movies very much but 1978’s Superman I like a lot. There’s a confident gentleness and playfulness in it – it’s not a brain-frying session of sensory overload full of explosions, desperately showy visual effects and self-seriousness. Superman flies around being adorably awesome and sweet and aw shucks and Clark Kent is the slyest fake man-dork ever. The movie is unhurried – it takes time to settle in with the characters, let us watch the romance between Lois and Superman blossom, lets the audience soak in the sense of wonder.. and yet the spectacle when it hits in the final part of the movie is still spectacular. Superman finds out that even though he’s practically invulnerable, he can still be hurt – and emotional hurt packs the bigger sting. The movie is a lovely time capsule from before the dark and gritty superhero deconstructions of the 1980s and 1990s – and I kind of prefer it. Deathly self-serious it is not.
There are no Moment in the Sun videos this week. At all. Not a one. It’s all been soundtrack – I do have a storyboard with music but it’s not ready to show off to the general public yet. Some sort of completeness of vision will help. I did another analysis of a cartoon on Sunday night and that’s it.
In the coming week I’ll be listening to a lot of 1930s swing to figure out the arrangement, watching more old cartoons intently, writing gags for Gronky and Pointy and getting along to the next stage of production where I’m ready to start blocking out animation within the 3D program.
But first I’m going to play a ton of Wasteland 2. Man that’s a good game.