Why and how I composed Project B

I interpreted the brief of this project was to accompany a game or to create dramatic effect in a film scene. Our project in the Video and Sound Techniques Module was to produce a short film, titled ‘Hidden London’. The story line of our short film is following what seems to be a standard good guy. However, it was important for us to portray both the good and bad parts of London so we decided to create the ‘nice guy’ who owes someone money. The main character fails to obtain the money and is stabbed, and dies. The story line is believable and interesting whilst maintaining an air of mystery, allowing the audience to use their own ideas to imagine what the background information is.

I felt motivated to compose this piece as I feel there is a lot of scope for ideas when composing music for this film.

I decided to compose the piece with various different timbres, instruments include, a piano, harp, violins, cello, bass, percussion, drums and a texture effect.

I wrote the piece to create the mood rather than a specific genre. My piece could be classed as a neo-classical. When composing my piece I was inspired by Cinematic Orchestra, I wanted to capture elements of jazz, with the sporadic drumming.

First I imported the film I was composing to, into Logic and set the tempo to 120bpm, the time signature of this piece is in is 4/4. I began by composing a simple piano riff using a logic piano plug-in. I recorded myself playing the chords C and D arpeggiated. Any mistakes I made, I manually corrected using the piano roll. With a simple riff I was able to create a rhythm, using a Logic jazz piano plug-in. Once I had finished creating a drum beat, I separated the drums into six separate tracks and panned the drums to fill the stereo field. I also wanted to imitate what you would hear if you were listening to drums live. I also created an auxilary channel, which I used as a reverb channel and sent the drum tracks individually so I could control the level of reverb on each track.

I then tweaked the E.Q. of each individual drum part; I found that when I increased the gain on the kick drum it caused distortion so I lowered the gain. For the snare, I slightly increased the mid range. The hi-hat, I E.Q'ed out a considerable amount of bass and heightened the high end. The toms I increased the bass slightly and cut out a bit of the mid range frequencies and cymbals I cut out some of the bass frequencies. Once I had finished tweaking the drums I composed the parts of the other instruments. I panned violins, along with the cello left and panned the clarinet right. This is to replicate the positions of the instruments in a hall, as the wind and string sections would be separate.

Once I had my finished composition used automation to affect the volume of the piece throughout to ensure the audio from the film can be heard and the levels are correct. To increase the dramatic effect and cause suspense and tension, I increased the volumes of all the instruments at tense parts to create a crescendo. I ended the piece by fading out the drums slightly and ended them abruptly to add extra dramatic effect.