Emmalie Hall
Lighting Artist
Team Marooned
Group Animation Progress
For this segment, I would like to create a full 30-60 second sound file for the group animation, including theme music that plays throughout the title card, animation, and credits, and sound effects for the animation itself. Sound effects and ambience will do their best to function as instruments themselves.
The Thought Process
How I Went About This Composition
I started off with asking the boys what kind of style they would like me to follow for the composition, and they pointed me to several different references, ranging from full orchestra to ethereal cyber-beats. I listened thoroughly to each reference as much as I could before, during, and after each phase of creation and editing.
After this, I thought of a general chord progression that I felt conveyed the moods throughout the short. As I learned throughout composing, trying to fit three separate moods into one song works for three minutes, but not so well for just thirty seconds. Therefore, after about a week or two of fleshing one composition out, I ended up scrapping almost everything except for the basic melody line in the body of the work.
Having settled on trying to convey just one general mood in one general key, I began to play with simple patterns and combinations of notes that fit within the key, carefully listening in each section to see that nothing sounded sour where it shouldn’t (which, in this composition, is nowhere). It took a great deal of tweaking, listening, and just straight-up scrapping sections and ideas while trying to still keep the general idea.
I found that a lot of what caused issues were the large swaths of silence between each segment of the song, so I searched the instrument library to find an instrument that could double as ambience. I found one called "stratosphere" I believe that captured exactly what I had been looking for, and it tied all of the rhythmic instruments together in a truly beautiful way.
The ice mallets, however, were my favorite to sprinkle throughout this piece, as they give off an ethereal air that just feels cold and distant, but also show a glimmer of hope from within, just like our subject. It's the hero/protagonist instrument, like the strings section in Peter and the Wolf. It held whatever I made together better and danced around it perfectly.
If I were to create this composition again, I would start by pinning down one key signature, and I will keep these mistakes and successes in mind when I am creating the soundtrack for UmberElla, my animatic. Thank you for this opportunity.