Emmalie Hall
Lighting Artist
UmberElla
This personal project was to create a narrative and a musical composition to accompany it.
UmberElla
Simple Animated gif with Composition
I definitely bit off more than I could chew projecting to be able to create enough painted frames for this composition, but I can give you a simple animated rain gif to go with my music. The purpose of this little 90 second clip is to indicate the joy and relief when Umber meets Ella and offers his umbrella to keep her dry. Her new friend walks her home, and all is well. The frame I was able to paint is unfortunately from the beginning of this story, when she is still afraid. I wish to revisit this next semester as a small animation/painting project, and I will hopefully be able to create a full length song for it (closer to three minutes in length, with a mood shift).
I started this piece by coming up with a baseline. This came to me, like many tunes do, when I was driving in rush hour traffic. Lots of time sitting around and waiting, and inspiration tends to strike then. I came up with a series of melody line riffs after the fact in another car ride, and that one I enjoyed the variety of a lot more. Only thing is that I could tell my brain was thinking in a 4/4 time signature for the base, but a 3/4 time signature for the melody. I basically went in hoping that since they both still gave the same importance to the quarter note and were in the same key, I would be able to compose them on top of one another somehow.
Luck was on my side, apparently, as when I tried putting just the first thirty seconds together, everything melded perfectly. Then I worked this piece to death, ran it into the ground. Each day, I would add another thirty seconds and then tirelessly change pieces around in the previous section to see what I could improve. For four more days, I have been just tweaking and shifting things to my liking, and it all seems to have a very conclusive, satisfying result to the ear. Everything settles in, a sort of relaxation for the listener (and potentially, viewer).
I thoroughly enjoyed working on this piece, and I hope to pick it up again soon so I can complete it.