Sound - Metromix video
Link to the final video (right click save as../ click to view in browser)
For our first assignment in sound we were tasked to create an audio soundtrack to go with a 1 minute clip from the manga movie ‘Metropolis’ by Osamu Tezuka.
Each member of the class was assigned a one minute clip out of a five minute extract from the film, and these clips will be put together for viewing in one of our lectures, so we had to take that into account and try to help the clips merge together (if we wanted to).
I decided to create a song that would try to recreate the atmosphere I felt when watching the clip, I thought it would be interesting to discard most of the usual methods I use when creating music tracks such as traditional timing methods. Instead changes of scene in the video would inflict changes in the music so that the different scenes and characters would have certain sounds associated with them.
I decided to use the music software I am most experienced with, which is emagic’s logic platinum, as although it is slightly dated now (I use the last pc version) it is more than capable for the task in hand.
I started by creating a backing drum beat for the track and then moved on to finding a riff that would give a feeling of urgency to the video, I used a funky guitar riff for this that I sped up from its original bpm 140bpm to the 174bpm I used for this track, I found this gave the video a sense of urgency.
Once I had done this I set about finding sounds to go with the different scenes in the video that would emphasise what was going on. such as a mechanical beeping sound to be associated with the machine and strange scream like sounds to go with the boy and ‘girl’ who are struggling to get away from the machine (or so it seemed). I synced up these sounds with the changes in scene with the video at first and then merged them together as the changes of scenes became faster towards the end.
I wound it down at the end as the boy and girl fall to the ground to help the clip merge into the next section of the video.
The final part of my process was to export the track as a wav which I then imported into Adobe Premiere pro to merge it with the video.
I was quite happy with the final result which I felt was a track that seemed to be a merge of drum and bass and fast techno.
The movie itself and screenshots of the development process will be up soon.