As explained in my last post about sound, which can be read here, I recorded a lot of water effects. I wanted to ground the adaptation and almost juxtapose what you see on screen. One of the things you absolutely (or really shouldn't) associate with computers is water and that is the grounding element of the play and I needed that grounding within my adaptation for it to be successful. I also needed the water to help add to the character of Ariel. In the original play the 2 characters which are complete opposites in demeanor and in status are Ariel and Caliban. I was reading around the character a while back and saw an article on how Shakespeare intentionally made Ariel an 'Elemental Being of the Higher Order' by assigning him the upwards tending-elements Air and Water. To oppose this he made Caliban an 'Elemental Being of the Lower Order' by assigning him the downwards-tending elements Fire and Earth. Meaning to give the piece more depth of meaning juxtaposing the sound and the projection is, for me personally, the best way to go.
When I first pitched this idea I described the soundtrack as water effects with 8-bit orchestrations and I've tried to stick to that. One of the things I love about working in Protools is being able to take an existing sound and change it so that the timbre is the same yet the effect is different. One of the things I tried out whilst editing was taking the existing sounds of water (and my piano simulating objects hitting each other underwater) and turn them into more computerised / robotic sounds. I would then play them together and play around with the mix so you could get the best of both effects, the grounding of the water along with the diegetic sounds of the computer.
Throughout this project I really wanted to get a midi track in there to give the project a musical element alongside the soundscape as Shakespeare did this himself, in The Tempest more so than others. Ariel in particular sings a lot of his 'spells' so he has a even bigger presence as a spirt. However now we are so close to deadline I think this is very much a time dependant element that may have to take a backseat as whilst I've done a fair bit of research on the subject I've yet to figure out the composition.
I should also point out the waves in the track is an online find, I thought I could get away with just having water sounds but nothing could really replace the actual sounds of waves and since there's no sea nearby I turned to the internet. I do think that it was the right decision though, the piece really needed a better tonal centre than the keyboard typing.
So I played around with the sounds I've already got then imported my video to sync things up however in the soundtrack I had to accommodate around 10 secs of film at the beginning that doesn't exist yet. I also had to work around the fact that some of the sounds are sill missing. It's completely self inflicted, I just forgot that I needed to record some extra 'computer' sounds to give a more diegetic sound to the track and to accent some of the movements such as the 'pinch-and-zoom' and the social media pop-ups. But this can all be rectified with one last session in Protools or Audition if I desperately have to to.
So that's all I've got so far - here is a another trial run I did quickly in Premier Pro, I tired to match it up the best I could but without the little bit of video at the beginning it proved difficult. There are still some things now looking back I need to change but I think this is a better representation of the final product. George Lucas is right - sound really is half of the experience.
No comments :
Post a Comment