There was definitely improvements to be made on the timeline, so this week I started to develop the idea. First I needed to give more depth to my timeline idea as it felt a bit flat and straightforward. To try and add some depth to the descending scale part, instead of having the line just travelling downwards in the frame, I could have it travelling further away and coming back as if weaving around something. I think this would work better than the simple downwards motion and still give this essence of movement and travelling. The music is bubbly and fast, almost like water trickling, and from the start I was imagining deep blue tones - so I started to see a river forming as I listened to the music more and looked at my initial drawings. I also added a sudden drop in the 'river' to end the first part and make way for the middle part of the sound. For the airy flute middle part, I always imagined an object like a feather or leaf. My visuals were starting to resemble dandelions and this would also go well with when the middle part sort of disbands before the gunshot sound:
I started to imagine my sound taking place in a forest-like location; the river weaving around trees maybe, green, blue, living, bubbly, but maybe a bit dark and mysterious. When thinking of this I remembered 'Little April Shower' from Bambi. In the beginning, the raindrops fall on the leaves in time to the music notes (then the scary singing begins...). The music is also used to represent the thunderstorm with human voices for wind and symbols for lightning - there is no sound effects at all in this scene, only music. So this inspired me to maybe have a very lively, forest-like setting for my animation, or at least be influenced by this kind of setting:
Above is a sketch of my new idea taken from the timeline along with the kind of colour change I want to happen in the animation. I think colour will be an important key to support the soundtrack for my animation, although I am not sure how I am going to achieve colour yet (as in what medium to use). My thoughts on colour reminded me of colour scripts used for films, which help set the mood and atmosphere of a scene. Sometimes you can see the colours change dramatically in the script to support the changing mood of a scene. In my animation I would like to have the calm, moody colours for the first part of the soundtrack but then a dramatic change to violent, bright colours for the gunshot. Our timeline strips also reminded me a bit of colour scripts:
Once I was happy with the adjustments to my timeline idea, I sketched out the keyframes and put them together in an animatic using Take 5. It was surprisingly difficult getting the keyframes in time to the soundtrack!! The dope sheet was my initial reference for this, but it also took a lot of testing with the visuals and the sound until I was happy with one arrangement (unfortunately the video gets really dark in the middle, so apologies for that!):
The part I am having most difficulty with is the gunshot. I left it out of my animatic as I am still not sure what to do with it! My initial visions are very literal, but I am not entirely happy with this 'ending' to the piece. I do want it to be very sudden and contrasting, and bold and brash.
So I started to think about other examples of gunshot sound affects and their visuals and ideas for alternative ways I could present this sound in visuals. In my last post I mentioned the opening scene to "A Fistful of Dollars"; there were many gunshot sound affects in that opening title that were not being represented in the visuals by actual guns or bullets. The same is in the opening titles for "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" - I liked how the visuals and images just shatter or dissolve in time to the gunshot. It also shares the same action of horses galloping and the same colours of red, black and white. This has been my favourite use of the gun shot sound effect that I have seen:
Next I am going to experiment animating in different mediums (with the workshops to follow) and see what works best. I also would like to experiment more with the visuals for the ending gunshot...
Just to end on, I liked the style of this little animation to advertise BBC 4's program "The Sound of Cinema". It uses the music-wave idea to represent the movement of the sound and integrates it into visuals representing iconic films:
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