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Music Reel - 2016 - Version 1

Here is a compilation of some music and sound design I've made for short films.
Next year I plan on having more medium length projects.

https://vimeo.com/128506411

Enjoy :-)

Printing with Rubber Blocks and Linoleum Cutting Tools

So I've been on a non-stop visual purge lately, much to the chagrin of my inner neat-freak.

Making art with your hands can be dirty and messy and I love it! Having been tied to the computer making vector graphics and midi-pre-production music for the last couple of projects I've worked on, I was more than happy to get paint and ink all over my hands again.

These pieces are the ones I'm most satisfied with this week. I started carving away at the rubber printing blocks on Sunday night and by Wednesday morning:

 

The process is really simple.  With my linoleum cutting tool (pictured), I started carving away at some print blocks made of rubber. Everything I cut away would be white, and everything I left untouched would print the colour I applied to it. When printing, sometimes brush strokes or marks from the roller were left behind. I kept those for interesting textures. As I had a limited supply of colours to print with, I ended up digitally colouring the pieces and cutting the compositions into a unified square format.

Soundtrack for an Adventure Short Film "Kuwululu"

So last month I was in lovely Köln/Cologne again to record and mix the music I composed for a short adventure film,"Kuwululu", which was shot in Ghana and directed by Dolunay Gördüm. It's a 25 minute film project of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

I learned immense amounts of stuff...and realised how much I have yet to learn. Motivation is not amiss! I'm definitely looking forward to the next time I get to do a recording session with live string, percussion and woodwind players. But let us go back to the near past, as I've been sitting on this blog post for too long:

Here is a smartphone video I shot in the studio while I was editing the recordings. I'm used to using PreSonus Studio One for everything from composing to picture to recording to editing to mixing, but this time I had to jump into ProTools territory.

In the meanwhile, I've gotten so used to ProTools that I sometimes mistakenly try to use its keyboard shortcuts in Studio One! Hehe. It's never too late to start working with the standard industry software, especially now that I've starting working outside of my little home setup. That said, I hope Studio One becomes more popular in the near future. I find it easier to browse and search for the effects and plugins I need in it.

So much for the software. Our "hardware" for this project was composed of strings, varied percussion instruments and flute as well as an Indian bansuri and a Nigerian Udu. On the receiving end were some pretty nice microphones all set up in the Cologne Academy for Media Arts studio by the amazing in-house sound engineer, Judith.

Here's a picture of the room we recorded the strings in. There are also people in it. These are string players. And Dolu. He is the director. Now the rest of this paragraph is more technical and should serve as a future reference for myself because it was all new information to me. It might be a bit boring for anyone else who usually reads my blog (shout out to my one reader: thanks, Baba). We had two cardioid mics for a focus on the violin and viola each. Violin was left and viola was right, just like in an orchestra pit haha. The double bass had a pick-up mic glued to the bridge as well as a supercardioid mic for more focus. On top of that, the in-house sound engineer set up her special stereo mics on the ground on the polar opposite of the double bass about one and a half metres apart to take in the whole atmosphere of the room, so that we had more than one option to mix the bass (whatever sounded better: bass from the room or bass from the more focused supercardioid or pickup mics).  I ended up ditching the pickup in the mix because it was just too powerful. You could hear the individual resin particles scratching the tiny grooves in the strings and the horse hairs of the bow very slowly tearing. It all sounded like something from a horror movie. The best bass sound came from the room mics- they added a space to breathe.

More making-of pics. Here we are rehearsing some parts with the flutist to picture (he had a screen showing the film parallel to ours in his booth to watch as he played). The director said that I gave the players instructions on how to play -breath, dynamics, nuances- much as a director would for his actors. Never thought of it that way but now that I do think about it- I have to start working more on my peepol skillz and polish up my presence for when I conduct a whole orchestra. Ha.

Here are a couple of roughly edited pre-final mixdowns of pieces from various points in the soundtrack.

https://soundcloud.com/zazuka/kuwululu-soundtrack-prefinal-mix-part-01

Enjoy!

Bonus! Phone Photo! Köln Dom by Night! No tourists! I was walking alone after a long night of editing in the studio and passed by the Cologne Cathedral. The square before it is usually buzzing with bumbling tourists and their selfie-sticks but this night, it was just me and his magnificence, face to freakishly huge face. In the silence, he spoke to me and said something in stoneish that I seemed to understand in some archaic part of my subconscious brain. It was something about carrying your heavy burden gracefully...but to really understand it, you have to confront him yourself.

Abstract Soundscape 01

Abstract_Soundscape_01

So this is a modified version of a comissioned piece I made for an experimental short film by my friend and creative colleague, Ahmad Samara. I thought it came out very adaptable to different situations image and content-wise.
It could even be used on its own as a kind of an acoustic "brain-cleaner". If you need your ears to be cleaned out of a repeating annoying song, an affliction also known as "having an earworm"- try this out. It worked for me. Now I just think about the long echoes in the track, and that's somehow soothing. The picture I chose to go along with it is of one of my favourite subjects: street lamps shining through trees at night. I think it fits with the whole nocturnal feel.

Enjoy.

Zazuka is going to....Soundtrack_Cologne

Soundtrack_Cologne is a music congress that happens every year in the beautiful gem of North Rhine Westphalia, Cologne. I am lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time so I decided to go!

Among other things, I'll get to see "Coraline" soundtrack composer Bruno Coulais in an open discussion and take part in a workshop by video game soundtrack composer Jason Graves.

So excited! I fattened up my fish from the Cannes days and gave her the colours of the congress :D

2D Animation Process

The music video animation I was working on is finally complete and being cut into the final sequence. Several people asked me how long it took and so I thought it would be interesting to roughly explain what goes into making such a 2D animation sequence as the one I was working on mostly on my own. Several months can go into preparing less than one minute of animation and most people I know who aren't involved in animation wonder why. It's worth mentioning that it takes a lot less time if there is a focused team working on the piece, but I happened to undertake this particular endeavour with little outside support.

Here is a graphic, for those who don't like to read too much :)

First of all, there is the conception phase. The director, singer/songwriter and I spent about three weeks just looking at different films and artwork and figuring out what suited the style of the music we had to make a video for. Parallel to that, a storyboard was made which is basically a visual representation of the script written by the director. The storyboard pictures are then set to the music and the scenes are cut according to the beat or the lyrics. For example, when the singer starts singing about the stars, we've reached the night-sky scene. Everything has to be timed correctly before starting actual animation.

Second of all comes the designing of the characters and backgrounds. For this project, there was about a month of back and forth of feedback with new versions being created until a unanimous decision was reached. All the artwork was original without the use of any stock footage. Some of the artwork was trashed as a result of eliminating what we didn't want. Usually, in order to have one finished background, the background artist usually designs a few options and then starts refining the chosen option, going through several versions until the solution is reached.

Third of all comes the animation, which has to be planned and timed again to the beat and lyrics. There were four types of animation in this case:

1. effect animation (such as northern lights, water splashes, confetti etc...)
2. character animation (which has sub-categories such as animating the face for emotion and secondary animation of the hair and clothes which move along with the head and legs etc...)
3. camera movement, which I include in the animation because the camera plays a big role in conveying the message. It could be sweeping across a landscape or shaking when two objects collide. These movements don't happen on their own...someone is "animating" the camera.
4. background animation, which includes fishes in the background, clouds drifting by or waves in the seawater.

The animations aremade up of 25 pictures per second. Some frames are held which means that sometimes there are less than 25 actual drawings per second. The first animations are always rough and sketchy.

Fourth comes cleaning the animation and colouring it. Clean lines are drawn on top of the rough layer below. Then, the line drawings are coloured with the palette that was agreed upon in the conception phase. Finally, some highlights and shadows are added to give an indication of where the light from the environment is coming from. These highlights and shadows also have to be painted or masked on frame by frame to suit the movement of the character. I find that cleaning animations takes a longer time than rough animation, because the hand has to be precise. This also means that the person cleaning and colouring has to take breaks from the computer to prevent muscle cramps and inflammation ;)

The fifth phase and one of the most fun phases for me is when everything comes together: compositing. All the layers; background, animation, effects, shadows, light reflections are stacked on top of each other in front of the camera. The music is played with the animation to make sure the editing is right and everything is synced. Then everything is exported and packaged into a file which can be previewed by the director and singer/songwriter. Again, in our project, there were a few revisions to go through before the final product was reached.

All in all, the animation and compositing phase of about 930 frames took three months because our team was very small. Ideally there are seperate people filling in the following roles:

Director/Writer, Art Director, Storyboard Artist, Background Artist, Character Designer, Character Animator, Effects Animator, Clean-up Artist, Compositor/Editor, et cetera. I personally had to take on  7 roles as this was a low-budget production. The two roles which I thankfully did not have to take on were: director/writer and character animator for the most part. I ended up actually rough animating some sequences. Switching between roles also takes time. Getting into the flow of animation for example, takes a very different mindset than planning how to composite a shot and bring all the elements together.

In numbers:

The animation of less than 40 seconds took 5 months.

3 scenes. 10 shots. 6 backgrounds (some backgrounds where used for more than one shot). Some shots were combined in flowing transitions without cuts which is a lot more challenging than cutting to different shots.

2 main character designs (human) and 5 side character designs (freely moving tree, different fish, etc...)

625+ character animation frames (counting seperate frames for seperate characters. Loops constitute roughly one third of this number)

100+ background animation frames (fish, jellyfish, etc...)

800+ effect animation frames (not chronological, but parallel to other animations).

15+ postproduction files (one for each shot, some for seperate effect animations and then one for the whole pre-final sequence and another for the final sequence)

I hope if someone reads this far, that a) they are not tired out by the information which I tried to present in clear terminology and b) they appreciate a bit more the amount of work that goes into a bit of their entertainment time.

Below are two stills. Overall I'm satisfied enough with the work to let it go and dissatisfied enough to be motivated to do a better job next time :)

Peace out.