Memory - The Brief | Award Sounds

Memory is the first production for Spinneyhead Presents. It's a low budget, practically zero budget series of 5 short episodes. Current spend has been about £35 for some props. That's excluding travelling expenses, bear in mind that everyone lives within about 40 miles of the 3 locations used.

Ian announced on his Spinneyhead blog that he wanted to do a short film and asked for contributors. I took on the role of composing the music and providing sound effects for the series. However it quickly became clear that there was little experience of location recording (and that includes myself). Many of us had experience with sound rigs ranging from DJing to sound reinforcement for live bands, however I was the only one with any real experience of recording, studios, audio processing. My advice was to record at inside locations only, we didn't have budget or kit to record outside. If everything was inside, we could have put together a recording rig from decent mics. Nothing would have been ideal at this budget, but it would have been better than just using the camera mics. Since the script (written by Ian) had outdoor locations, we decided on using the camera mic and a stereo clip-on mic. This was after performing a test of microphones in the wind and deciding on which worked best. Even so, the mics were overload by the windnoise - you can see how much wind by watching the first and second episode.

I'd read a synopsis of the script and wrote a theme for it. This was an early throw-away for me, if it's suitable then it'll stick and I can improve it. If it doesn't work for this particular vehicle, then I'll add it to the library. In this case, it didn't suit the feel of the full script. Ian (as director) also rejected it. The good thing is that it gave us something to compare and to base ideas on for the future.

After looking at the script, I'd come to the conclusion that I'd have put something almost 80's style with a mixture of synths and real instruments. The sort of soundscape I was thinking of was similar to what Giorgio Moroder was doing around that time. Not sure what made me think of that style, but it seemed to fit. Probably something about the setting being in the very near future and I wanted to evoke some memories of the movies scores from the early 80s. They were often very electronic and like all genres, some better than others.

After speaking to Ian, I was given the following brief:

Opening/intro music:

20 seconds - starting with a sound similar to the noisy, breathy voices at the beginning "I'm Not In Love" by 10cc. At the point I heard this description, it all fitted together. Composing a theme with a mixture of 10cc and Moroder would work really well. This was meant to be moody and low key. This was to fit over the titles and between scenes 2 and 3 in Part 1. The last bit didn't happen since the video didn't end up that way.

Closing/outro music

30 seconds - over the rolling credits. Should be thematically similar to the intro, but faster.

Fanfare for Spinneyhead Presents

10 seconds - lots of horns, can almost imagine the searchlights

Trailer - 1 min cut down version of the main music

When we discussed the times further, especially when we considered what would be on the screen at the time, the times apart from the trailer were cut by half at least.

Since there's not much movement in the episodes, I decided to keep the music present at least in the background and rode the faders or automated as appropriate. Speech was key and there was no action to sync music on, so the music was background music with the occasional theme showing through.

I wrote the music for a trailer, this time fitting in breathy sounds, pulsating rhythm and a melody on a piano. Used orchestral percussion to heighten suspense towards the end of the trailer.

Between Ian and me, we chose the scene changes. Oddly enought this was the opposite way round to what I'd usually expect; in this case, the music for the theme came first, the video was cut for the trailer to fit the music, then the music was changed slightly to make the scenes changes fit more cleanly.

The theme for the trailer became the main theme for the episodes. The different instruments were brought in an out according to the action on the screen. For each episode I added or removed an instrument. The idea was to do a musical version of the game (start with "trail", end up with "snake" in 4 moves where you can change one letter at a time).

Generally, I received each episode on a Wednesday with the aim to get it back the following day after having written 3-5 minutes, ready for the Friday debut. This worked for every episode. Fortunately the first two episodes were provided early which left time to process the audio (not the music, but the dialogue and background) since the recorded audio was in dire need of being cleaned up.

After watching the first episode with original recorded audio, I decided to blend the main intro theme into the background theme and have it running, but with different emphasis on which instrument for the outro. This became common for the rest of the episodes. This meant that there was no separate intro nor separate outro. Everything was blended.