Melissa's Blog

I enjoyed working on this project and, especially, getting to create my own brief. I feel like it was definitely impacted by the whole COVID-19 crisis and thus, I couldn’t do everything I was planning for this project (I discuss at many points in my blog exactly what aspects were affected). Something I didn’t really write about was the mistake of having chosen WordPress as the site for my blog. If I had known that inserting audio was a premium feature I would have probably chosen Tumblr or some other site. I also thing WordPress is unnecessarily complicated to use and customize, which is why my blog doesn’t look as pretty as I wanted.

The feedback sessions I had with my teachers definitely put me on track and both gave me good tips for how to advance my project. I also gave myself periods of rest so I could look at my work with fresh eyes and figure out what I could do better.

My development process was quite different because I didn’t really create sketches like for my other projects but I did make new versions for the scenes whenever I felt like I wasn’t convinced by my music so I suppose those could count as sketches. Most of the time, I just deleted the parts I didn’t like and added new stuff but for 2 scenes (the first two I made), I deleted almost everything and pretty much started from scratch. This was extremely difficult to do, but the quality did improve a lot on the new versions.

My musical ideas, I feel, were quite original and both my teachers seemed to like them, which was a huge relief. What I personally didn’t like that much was the foley I did. It was my first time doing it so I guess it’s all right but you can definitely tell I’m not really experienced. As for my time-management plan, I didn’t exactly follow it because some weeks I don’t feel as inspired as in others and I can’t come up with too many ideas, but I didn’t find myself doing most of the project in the final week, either.

I’ve also discussed at various points in my blog the things I would’ve improved with a bit more time so I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but I will mention how much I would’ve loved to do the full dance scene for at least one of the versions (with both music and foley). This scene originally lasts for like 5 minutes but it would’ve been definitely too much work. I’ve also previously discussed some of the issues I’ve had right at the moment I was dealing with them so I see no point in writing it again (but less detailed because I’ve mostly forgotten how I felt at the time).

Overall, a super fun project that, combined with the health crisis, taught me how to solve my own problems without relying too much on my teachers.

Today I finished my 4 scenes. I was very pleased with the final touch-ups, I added the sound effects my teacher sent me and I downloaded some others from an online website to add a bit more foley. For the ‘good’ chase scene I added some stronger hits for when Aladdin first slides into action and when the wooden structure falls at the end. For this last scene I also added a wind effect to accentuate the fall. I then added a crash sound for when a barrel gets thrown by Aladdin.

For the other chase scene, I added a different sound effect for when the guards are first shown. It’s a mysterious sound that I found on the same website by clicking random audio files. I also added the crash and wind sound effects from the other chase scene as well as another wind effect for when Aladdin slides down the rope.

For the ‘bad’ dance scene, I added a lot of effects like a bell sound for when the princess’s face is focused and some other weird effects. My favourite is a cartoonish sound for Jasmine’s eyes at around 20 seconds in. I think it’s quite funny and it got me thinking that making a scene with only cartoonish sound effects would’ve been super fun and I definitely would’ve tried it if I had had more time.

The more electronic dance scene (‘good’) also needed some more foley but, unfortunately, Logic X started to overload and I got many weird pop ups. I tried to look on the internet how to optimize the software but it’s not straightforward and I’m a bit out of time now. I did find out that freezing tracks could help and I also bounced in place a number of tracks to reduce the workload on the software but this only allowed me to add about 2 sound effects before it started crashing again. I decided to leave the foley up to there, about 20 seconds in. I would’ve loved to finish that scene but I hope that the editing I’ve done for the other scenes was enough to make up for it. I’ll definitely look into more solutions for this overload so I don’t have to deal with it in the future.

(This is the website I found for sound effects).

Anyway, I had lots of fun but I’m glad my videos are ready. Tomorrow I’ll just fix my blog a bit, (I’m having a lot of trouble figuring WordPress out) and getting everything ready to submit!

My videos are already up!!

I recently got some feedback from my music teacher and he suggested I could add to the foley by including some other sound effects (which he kindly sent me) at specific moments he deemed appropriate. He also suggested I called my soundtracks A and B as opposed to good and bad but I still think the bad soundtracks are bad for a reason. I feel like the chase scene just sounds ridiculous with the horror music because of the bright colours and cheerful characterizations. I still tried by best to change the mood into a scary one but I don’t think you could honestly take it seriously.

The second bad soundtrack is just wrong because of all the traditional Chinese instruments and sounds I’m using. The movie is set in an Arabic country so it makes no sense whatsoever to have foreign musical elements in it. I also added a very weird transition into a more upbeat section which sounds very unnatural (and let’s not forget the squeaky toy at the very end).

I appreciated that they were good enough that my teacher considered the “bad” label unnecessary but I still think they’re a bit too funky.

The reason I didn’t make them excessively bad is because it would’ve been way too easy to just throw random instruments and audio and make both scenes sound like complete trash.

Anyway, I’m currently fixing my blog so that it looks more aesthetic and interesting (I still struggle with figuring ou WordPress), but tomorrow I’ll be fixing the last details to the scenes with this new feedback.

The first scene looks too Arabic for traditional Chinese elements and the second one looks too colourful to be from a horror movie but I still tried my best to make the ‘bad’ soundtracks work in an interesting way.

I wanted to discuss in this blog post where some of my ideas for this project came from. My whole concept for the project was based on a youtube channel I found that’s called “Editing is Everything” wherein the youtuber edits movie trailers to make them seem of different genres. That’s how it occured to me that I could take some scenes from a well-known movie and make them communicate a very different message.

As for the scenes themselves, I wanted the “good” ones to be somewhat Arabic mixed with rock or some other genres (I ended up using rock and electronic music) to give it a different feel while maintaining the the theme of the movie so I listened to very weird Arabic artists that mixed many styles of music with their own.

The ‘bad’ dance scene has traditional Chinese elements which makes it sound very weird because of all the Arabic elements so it was an interesting juxtaposition. I thought of this one by accident because I was trying to get a sample from another instrument when I picked a Chinese one . This reinforced my idea that I could make the ‘bad’ scene sound so much crazier and have the current ‘bad’ scene (the electronic one) act as the ‘good’ one and scrap the old version.

For the horror-themed scene, I used some tips from the online film-scoring course I mentioned previously. The instructor mentions the use of a single note that repeats throughout the piece and how it creates an ominous feeling.

That is what the videos look like. The instructor uses Ableton Live but all of the tips he gives can be easily applied to Logic X too.

As I mentioned, I have been reading 2 books regarding music (I’ve recently finished “Arranging for Strings”) and I got some useful tips from one in particular while the other helped me more on the theoretical side of music.

Today I continued fixing the very first scene I worked on, the ‘good’ version of the chase scene. I had done an ending with electric guitar which was a bit too dramatic for my taste but I only considered changing it until today. I took some inspiration from a piece of an apple loop but transposed it to the key I was on and changed bits of it. I did still used an electric guitar sound but the ending is working a lot better.

I also attempted a bit of foley (on the part where the rope slides I added a bit of “wind” sound effect) but haven’t really done the footsteps. I will probably do this after my tutorial because right now I don’t have much time. My tutors agreed with me removing the foley part from my brief as long as I still attempted bits of it so I’m super happy about that. Hopefully it won’t be that difficult!

I felt this bit was important because the camera focuses solely on this element for about 2 seconds (which is a lot for this type of scenes) so that’s why I chose to add some foley to it.

I’ll continue to add some more foley to the rest of the scenes as soon as I’m done with this one.

In preparation for my last tutorial, I had been looking at my progress on each of the four scenes and I realized that my second scene (the good version of the dance scene) was quite bad. The music sounded out of tune somehow, very unstable. What I did in complete desperation was switch this version (the “good” one) with the “bad” one because this electronic one could actually work as the good version with some adjustments. I deleted most of the sounds of this previous good version and went crazy with the sound effects. I added distortion pedals (which we recently learned from Joe) to audio recordings I already had and looked for other ones on the internet (small sections of Chinese instruments).I feel like adding these types of sounds to an Arabic theme can work as a ‘bad’ soundtrack because it’s obviously a contradiction.

This is what the pedals look like!

These are the two Chinese instruments I used samples from. The one on the right is the guzheng and the left one is the yueqin.

The dance scene I was working with for the electronic version was quite a long one (because I had lots of ideas for the beginning) so I had to shorten it for this new “bad” version (it still meets my brief’s requirements) because I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with work.

For the horror-themed scene, I added a recording of a creaking door which made all the difference for the suspense I wanted to achieve, but it was already pretty good.

I found myself dissatisfied with my first scene (the ‘good’ chase scene), which was surprising. The way I remembered it, it sounded super cool so it was a definite disappointment. I deleted most of the sounds I already had and created new ones. I also used flex time to quantize some tracks that sounded off. I think the new version was miles better so now I’m ready to send my portfolio for feedback.

P.S. I downloaded a plugin from the internet that’s used to reduce noise in recordings so it has come in handy for some of my phone recordings, like the piano and clapping and other percussive sounds I had previously recorded. I looked for a youtube tutorial on how to use it and I absolutely loved it! It makes such a difference! This problem was worrying me quite a bit so I’m glad I found an alternative.

This is what X noise looks like! (After poking around the website I found out that uploading audio to WordPress sis a premium feature so, unfortunately, I can’t show the before and after of an audio file).

As I previously mentioned, I had decided a while back to add a kind of “horror” theme to one of the scenes due to the strange juxtaposition it would imply (Aladdin being a children’s movie and all) so I’ve been working on it more intensely for the last couple of days, but I’m worried I haven’t been experimenting too much.

Wanting to develop the first single idea that comes to mind into a final piece was my greatest weakness last semester as far as I can tell and I’ve taken notice that the self-isolation and lack of face-to-face interaction with my tutors and peers have exacerbated that “laziness”. I would usually draw a lot of inspiration from the other music students because our styles are extremely different so they unintentionally push me beyond my comfort zone and now I don’t really have that anymore so I feel a bit lost in that sense. However, I discussed some options during my tutorial and I’ll now be doing “sketches” as before to make sure I experiment enough.

So, back to the soundtrack, I incorporated some of the recordings I made for the other chase scene but I still don’t get the horror feel entirely so I’ll have to try some other concepts and maybe revisit the lessons that discuss horror scenes from the online course I’m taking.

There’s one interesting idea that I have, though. In my other scene, I stop the clip when Abu (the monkey) falls into Aladdin’s shoulder. For this one, though, I’m gonna extend it a bit because there’s a close-up on the princess and then on Aladdin, and I think I can do something interesting with this horror-themed soundtrack.

(These are the close-ups that I mentioned).

I’ve realized that fixing the tempo in the “tedious way” isn’t really working because I can only get close to a steady beat when I record sounds or software instruments but I’m not a robot and fixing every individual note still doesn’t make the music sound even. So, I looked up some YouTube tutorials and it turns out using “Smart Tempo” is indeed the solution. It is quite a complicated tool and I’m not sure I have the experience to use it but I’m deep enough in this process so might as well give it a go.

After quite a long time I did manage to use it and it almost matched the tempo perfectly (there is a brief section in which it speeds up and slows down for no apparent reason but it’s not that noticeable). After that, I pretty much had to re-record all the tracks and sounds I had made but having the tempo matched with Logic just makes everything 100 times more easy.

I still have a long way to go in order to get it to a decent level (and still two more scenes to go) but this tool will save me a bunch of time in the future.

I also learned how to import sections of other Logic X projects into the current one so I have reused some of the percussive sounds I created for the past scene so that this one doesn’t sound too artificial.

This is what smart tempo looks like. You can adjust the orange lines to fix sections of the tempo in case Logic got something wrong. It’s been a big challenge but I’m glad I took the time to learn (roughly) how to use it. Thanks to this I can finally get started on the other version for the dance scene. Because I want to do something really different, I am planning to use electronic music. I feel that the whole Arabic theme will contrast perfectly with this genre so I’m excited to get started very soon.

I haven’t really discussed this scene because it was not in my original plan. Originally, I wanted to include the scene right before the magic carpet one (a more romantic scene) for a greater contrast between that and the action scene but it had some male and female dialogue. I wrote about this issue in one of my previous posts, about how I was planning to do some experimenting on recording dialogue with my classmates, but since everyone’s self-isolating it would just be awkward if I do it myself, I believe. My solution ended up being choosing a different scene altogether.

This new scene is the dance the princess has with a bunch of other people (including Aladdin) in the palace. I’ve been working on it all day because of how much more complicated this scene is compared to the chase one. Since it includes dancing, I can’t mess with the tempo of the music I make because, otherwise, the movement will not match up with the sound.

I’m facing some major difficulties trying to make this work. I’m trying to understand how “smart tempo” works but it is very complicated for now and nothing matches up properly. I’ve watched some Youtube tutorials but it’s still not quite clear to me so I’m just gonna keep doing it the tedious way for now (without any time quantize and keeping the tempo as accurately as I can by ear).

In the book I’ve been reading, (Arranging for Strings) I found another useful tip for this project. It mentions some scales that have an Arabic feel to them and I did some more research into the Phrygian dominant. This scale has a very interesting feeling because of that raised third. (I would include an audio of it but, apparently, it’s a premium feature). I’ve gone back quickly to my other scene (the chase) to include a melody in this scale and it definitely adds to the overall feel.

For this scene, though, I will probably use this same scale but change it up somehow so that it’s noticeably different from what I did on the last scene. It’s quite challenging because both are energetic scenes so I’m tempted to copy my own previous style. To get more ideas, I’ll be listening to a greater variety of Arabic (especially Bellydance) and other genres so that I keep that mixture of styles but make it more like something you’d dance to.

I’m trying my best to not use a lot of software instruments but it is really really hard considering the circumstances so I’ll keep discovering other objects I can make sounds with just like I did for the other scene.

I still plan to do a lot more revising on both of these scenes as I move along because I know they’re short scenes so I need to do my best to make high-quality music (to the extent that I can!)

This is a screenshot from the scene I’m currently working on!!

I’m still working on the ‘good’ version of the chase scene I discussed before and I feel it has potential, but I feel a bit disappointed that I couldn’t record an electric guitar because of the outbreak. I made my project brief and picked the scenes assuming I’d get some time in the studio so it’s been hard to make everything sound good.

The idea was that I would be using as many real instruments as possible and, while I have been able to improvise percussive sounds from normal objects, the main voice for this particular scene was intended to be an actual recording of a guitar. I tried to make it sound as good as I could but I still feel it sounds artificial. I feel like the idea of combining a “rock” vibe with Arab undertones is really good but, because of the limitations, it won’t sound as good as I was expecting it to when I first came up with the idea.

I know the university will take the circumstances into consideration for our projects but I always feel inclined to do as best as I can and I feel like this project won’t meet my expectations.

I’ll still put in all the effort and maybe I surprise myself in the end.