Animatic & sound design

As the project puts a lot of emphasis on audiovisual blending, communicating well with Heath (music production) has extremely important. Thus far we have been translating each other's visual/audio styles. Giving Heath the animatic helped to roughly realise how to approach making this piece of music in a way which will draw out multimodality when watching/listening. It's a rewarding process as we started by establishing the melancholy atmosphere of the beginning of the film. Heath has commented that the knowledge of how the film will look has greatly assisted his creative process.

Since our initial animatic and soundtrack, we have experimented with a few aspects of the sound. Having our initial soundscape, we then sought out to characterise moments where sounds are visible with a kind of electronic foley. 

By roughly demonstrating where sounds are visible, Heath has the freedom to match them in his audio track in a rhythmic way. Then when it comes back to animating, I can ensure that the sounds are met with appropriate visuals which work within the rhythm of the tune.

I have also looked at leitmotifs in film. As with the two chords which announce the arrival of an enormous shark, certain characters in my film will trigger particular sounds to build association between senses while watching the film. The protagonist and side heroes will certainly feature musical riffs of electronic nature, adding a zest to their arrivals onscreen. Contrarily antagonists will be matched by dark chords. This will all be established in more detail during production, but the animatic will provide a taste as to how different characters are received. 

For aspects like precise timing, mood of the film and different settings, being in close communication has immensely helped. In studio practice for a music video, this method of the animations and music going back and forth is not the most conventional way of creating this media. Usually the filmmaker would be given the song and be instructed to create the visuals over it. For film, it works in reverse. one element essentially takes precedent over the other. My hopes with going back and forth and informing each other's practice with what we are creating is to create a video with more consideration to multimodality than others. However, I should look more into the production of soundtrack and music videos. Finding practitioners who blend sound and visuals through a symbiotic approach may have some key insights into blending audio-vision effectively.