An Optical Poem

An Optical Poem - Oskar Fischinger (1938)

An Optical Poem is a beautifully creative film that shows off a technically brilliant style of animation. The way that the shapes arrive on and move around the screen creates a sense of completion and calmness. The sounds heard are reflected by the shapes on screen as if a mental image, this style really creates a sense of beauty. About four minutes in, the shapes start rotating around each other, giving the image a real 3D feel, which again, reflects the sounds as the music flowing in circles almost. An Optical Poem really is what it says on the tin. Beautiful.

Nyle leaving

Unbeknown to Jamie and me, Nyle had been working on a separate sound project of his own for the module. After the feedback session, Nyle decided to leave our group and continue his project alone.

Audio Feedback

The audio session went fairly well. Jamie, Nyle and I felt as if we had a good enough piece to show to the group. The group liked our piece but gave us some very useful feedback.

The main feedback was that that we should:

• Add a few more sounds into the piece to avoid repetition.
• Change a few levels so that the bassier sounds would be more prominent.
• Organise our sounds into more of a structure.
• Alter the dynamics to create a more interesting piece.

The session was very useful as we felt that we had good enough feedback to create our piece a lot, lot better than it already was. The best comment was "You made normal mundane sounds into a bizarre nightmare of a day" this is exactly what we were going for. 

Recluse Audio Piece 1st Draft

Logic

During an editing session, on Logic, we decided that the structure of our piece would be less organised than we had originally planned, yet we wanted some sort of rhythm and beat that the listener would be able to grasp, but not enough for it to be satisfying or to be called a 'song'. As Nyle has previous experience editing sound on Logic, we decided to use this programme, which I think is very simple and effective, allowing us to enhance certain sounds that perhaps weren't recorded to such a high standard. 

After a couple of sessions together editing on Logic, we had a timeline (above) that we were happy enough with to present to the group, for feedback. I will make a post of the feedback given from the group and Martine.

3rd member

We had a new member join the group. Due to a group change, Nyle joined our group with no input to the original idea but with an enthusiasm for the project. Nyle has a background in music and was fairly adamant that we should make a song from the sounds that we were recording rather than creating a sense of chaos. Jamie and I were against this idea having tried out the song idea, it just didn't fit the brief as well as not being anywhere near our original idea. However, Nyle has a great knowledge of sound editing software Logic. This helped a lot in terms of putting together our preliminary piece for presentation to the group.

Tango

Tango (short film) - Zbigniew Rybczynski (1981)

For our sound piece, we took our main but of inspiration from this short animated film. The build of chaos in Tango is the main aspect that we plan to take from the film and try to emulate within our audio project and experimental film. 

The film starts with a single character entering the static frame of a room in a house. In our experimental film, I intend to start the film with one single screen, and for there to be multiple screens added creating a similar chaos to Tango's.

More characters start to enter the frame, doing their own thing as if there is no other people in the room with them. The characters don't acknowledge one another, yet they don't cross paths once, the sequence is very well organised so the characters don't 'bump' into each other. I will aim to have a similar organisation to my audio project and experimental film.

As the number of characters builds up, the audience has less of a grasp on what they should be concentrating on and on new characters being introduced to the scene. This is a feature that I would like to include within my audio project and experimental film.

Tango, inevitably starts to eliminate characters from the scene until there is only one character left. Rybczynski does this in a very quick fashion with little organisation. I don't think that I will try to emulate this within my audio project and experimental film. I think it would be much better if the build up of screens/sounds eventually becomes too much and stops suddenly with a distinctive sound being prominent at the end.