Projects

Venn - Episode 2

Alan — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:17:11 +0000

Episode 2 of Venn has been released.

I cleaned and mixed the audio and wrote/recorded the intro and outro music. Compared to previous episodes, this was a pleasure to mix. There was a lot less processing to do to get the audio up-to-scratch.

Related links

New Haven

Alan — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:26:37 +0000

I've been on the look-out for a Sci-Fi movie series a to get involved with. I wanted a side-project and after coming across a few old books I read and a few movies, I decided on the Space Opera theme. Lots of scope for over-the-top thematic music, a bit of rock and some atmosphere.

New Haven

I picked the New Haven project (previously known as Ticonderoga) as it fitted everything I was looking for out of a side-project. This had to fit alongside the normal jobs and projects.

New Haven's a good project. They had a gap for a composer, partly because the full feature's a long way off. That means there's a lot of other work to be done. The concept is original with a fresh perspective on sci-fi in space. It has potentially similarities with other sci-fi series (it's based around the military in space - hmm sound familiar?). It's difficult not to make comparisons really.

Fortunately, there are easily enough differences to make it stand out.

Firstly it's set in our own system, secondly there's no FTL travel, thirdly no aliens. Those three features alone set it apart from almost every other space opera. Add in a few other differences and it's easily headed to sit apart from the rest of the sci-fi series crowd.

What else?

I'm still looking out for other projects. Currently New Haven isn't taking up that much time. There's a long gap before I need to compose music for the soundtrack.

Venn Episode 1 in the works

Alan — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:47:52 +0000

I've recently received the video for the 1st episode of Venn (the previous release was a pilot and called Episode 0)

Again the episode is by Spinneyhead Presents. Episode 1 picks up from that and plays on the theme of the celibacy bet. The content is better than Episode 0, the scripts are better and from my perspective, the audio is so much better. It's definitely better than the first series, Memory.

This is the first episode that I've been happy with sound-wise. The quality of the recording far surpasses anything that the team has done before. I've seen series on BBC3 that had worse audio than this.

So what's this mean for me?

I can write music to fit the scene, instead of covering up audio errors
I can write less music. Yes, that's a benefit to all concerned. Check out Memory where I had to write a lot of music
I don't have to spend days or weeks cleaning up the audio manually (automated tools get you so far, but some things have to be tweaked manually)
The speech is already clearer and more intelligible
It's already more professional
It's easier to watch
More enjoyable from a production perspective

The audio has been improved greatly by recording with an off-camera microphone. Ian used a hand-held boom and microphone to achieve much better audio than possible with the on-camera microphone.

I'll post back when Episode 1 is released.

Memory On DVD

Alan — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:52:06 +0000

Ian, over at Spinneyhead Presents has announced that the DVD for Memory is now available to buy through Lulu.com.

Want to get some idea what you'd be getting? Then have a look at my previous posts here about Memory.

the Hand

Alan — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:58:58 +0000

The Hand.wav is a short piece of background music I was asked to write for a sitcom. This version is a 48Kz/16bit wav file. To download, right-click on The Hand.wav and "save target as"/"save link as" depending on which browser you use.

A more download-friendly mp3 is also available at this link: The Hand.mp3

Venn TV

Alan — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:54:33 +0000

One of the indie projects I'm involved in has published its own site at Venn.tv.

Expect to see further episodes over the next as they're released this year.

Currently the only released episode (as of 29th Jan 2008) is Episode 0 which you can see in the projects section.

Showcase Progress

Alan — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 16:54:51 +0000

I've been documenting the short movie's progress over at this site's sister site.

Free Video Editing with Ubuntu takes up from where this article leaves off.

The Cinelerra Experience is about trials and tribulations with the freely available video editor Cinelerra

Greenkeying Journey details a few thoughts on greenkeying and how the opensource/free software applications just weren't up to the job

I'll post back here when there's something more to show. In the meantime, I'll post about the process over at the other site where it more properly belongs

Venn - Episode 0

Alan — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 22:41:13 +0000

New Pilot

We've recently completed the pilot episode of Venn. This is from the same production team at Spinneyhead Presents that did Memory.

Things have moved on well since Memory was produced and this production has been a lot smoother (from my point of view at least).

The Tasks

I wasn't involved in recording the dialogue or location audio, instead I was provided with the video and audio files and had to edit the audio track ready for release. This included:

- adding driving game effects

- composing/recording music for phone text ring (including emulating it being moved and covered by hand)

- cleaning up some of the audio

- composing/recording music for the driving game

- composing/recording opening titles music

- composing/recording closing credits music

- mixing and mastering all the above into the audio track

Some Issues

If you listen to the part where the two characters meet at the door, you can hear a loss in quality. I believe that's due to it having been recorded on a different microphone. Not sure, but that's what I received anyway. Also after the opening titles, there's some distortion in the voices. I never did get to the bottom of that. It's in the source files and sounds like a digital distortion, similar to that caused by downsampling without dithering. Whatever it was, it was there in the source. I asked for an extra export from the source but with the source tracks reduced by 3dB or so in case there was some saturation. They're what ended up in the output.

At the point of recording the source footage, the actors were holding console controllers but not actually playing. I added the sound effects later.

Showcase preparation

Alan — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:35:10 +0000

The Short Reason

I've been writing the score for a showcase short. Rather than find some public domain footage, I decided to make a small movie myself.

I don't count directing as one of my skills, let alone acting, script-writing, cinematography, etc. However I do like the parallels and differences between still photography and cinematography. Mainly, I wanted the satisfaction of doing everything from start to finish. I also thought I'd learn some useful hints along the way about what directors go through in their creative and management process and how I could better fit into that.

Quality

I'm confident that the audio quality will be good. My skills lie in that area. One of my fears is that the video would be so much worse in quality than the audio that it detracted from being a showcase and instead just showed itself being a bad film. I'm hoping to avoid that by keeping it simple.

Public Domain

In the end, I shot some footage myself, but wanted different backgrounds. So I resorted to some public-domain footage for the background. I searched a few repositories including archive.org, being careful to check the licences for each. On some of the sites, it's not simple to search for the relevant licenses. I'm not actually convinced that all the clips have the correct license so it pays to be more careful and not include a clip you're not sure of.

Applications

I tried using ZS4 for the green screen chroma-keying. There's an awkward process of converting movies to be usable within the application. I like what they're trying to do, but from a usability point of view, it was awful. They seem quite open about the fact that ZS4 isn't their focus. It's good that they've written that because we can make some judgement about how much to rely on the software and the arrival of future updates . I saw Adobe Premiere the other day and within a few minutes I was making it do what I wanted. No manuals, no instruction. It was just so much easier. But I guess that's part of what you pay for.

There was also a bug in the process that meant that the background chromakeying wouldn't work for more than 3-4 minutes of the video. I didn't get to the bottom of whether it was user error or an application error. I just found it too troublesome to work through and I had other projects that needed working on.

So where now?

So that's where the production process has stopped. Shooting's complete, the score is complete, but I couldn't get the full chromakeying to work.

I'm a regular user of Ubuntu; I use it for the company server and I personally use it for a HTPC. I'm going to look into Ubuntu Studio (or possibly just installing the applications on a base installation). With the little time it now takes to install a basic Ubuntu distribution, I'll probably go for Ubuntu Studio and have a couple of hours figuring out the video applications. If that doesn't work out quickly enough, it'll go on the back-burner until I've some more slack-time.

The Future

I'll keep developments posted. I hope to get the short's premiere in one of the area's movie clubs towards the middle of 2008. After that, I'll post it on this site with a description of how it was made and, more importantly, how I approached the score and why I made the decisions I did.

Memory

Alan — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 22:21:29 +0000

Memory in full. For more background look at Memory and Spinneyhead Presents

The Trailer:

The only caveat I've really got with these is that there is music all the way through to cover up the background noise from location recording. Usually, I'd like gaps especially to draw attention to what the actors are speaking

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5: