Making A Movie About A Musician, Almost Forgot The Music

The irony. I almost completely forgot about the music in the film opening. We wanted a diegetic piano track (sound is presented as if it originated from our film's world) to be playing in the titular scene of the film opening... however, I have yet to compose the track and record it. As the tone of our film is melancholic, it would make the most sense to use minor chords and play something slow and sappy, in order to follow drama conventions and create an appeal with the audience.

Luckily, the process of making a track/song isn't incredibly complex for me. I mentioned in a previous post that the software GarageBand was my initial inspiration for our character's musicial ability. Being musician myself in the real world, I have learned my way around the software. It has the capability to record what I play on my piano keyboard and saves it as a file that I can email, text or AirDrop to myself, which makes the process of recording minimal.


The process of composing is a different story. What should it sound like?? My partner Lexi told me to "just do some slow piano melody"... which wasn't very helpful. I'm pondering the idea of playing some soft minor chords coupled with some ambient vocals (me going "oooOohhh" or "aAHhhhH") for the title sequence, and then the rest of the film opening be the solely the piano instrumental. I of course have to run everything I consider past Lexi, but I really do  think she'd love the idea.

Screen-capture of GarageBand final product 💁:

I don't know if you can tell from the screen cap, but the music track essentially has two nuances to it. Initially, I created a piano track of the same 4 repeating chords and laid down a ambient vocal track on top of that. After that was finished, I made the instrumental track by muting the vocals and lowering the sound, and then recorded my character's monolgue on top of that track. Simple right?

Group Feedback Reflection #2

So today in class we worked in groups to discuss our projects for another feedback session. Going around in groups and hearing what everyone was working on was really inspiring...but also incredily stressful. One group is literally almost completely done with filming already and it's not even spring break yet! I have a disadvantage with my partner being gone on her vacation, but I have faith that we can rush the filming process if the planning is perfect. One girl from my group showed us her blog and it was so in-depth--there were so many pictures and of her asesthetic inspiration as well as behind the scenes from when her group was filming it was amazing! I'll be sure to take similar pictures and post them in a blog post:) Stay tuned!

~The Vision~

Welcome back to the Portfolio in Progress. Now that Lexi and I have overcome our major problem and actually have an idea, we can now begin the process of refining and adding details in this week so that we can start filming next Tuesday, which is a super testing day so we don't have school.

I will do my best in this post to articulate the vision for the 2-minutes:

• Establish the main character as a musician in the first frames with diegetic sound of a piano melody playing (I'll either use a pre-existing track or create a new one with GarageBand)
• The sound of the song is interrupted by the protagonists' father who gestures her/him to follow him
• Scene cuts to a brief montage sequence which will build the character development of both the protagonist and her father. Narration will also begin in this sequence, which will continue for the duration of the 2 mins. Lexi and I have discussed the montage and are thinking that it will include shots of a father playing guitar and watching the protagonist play piano.
• The script has yet to be written, but we have decided that the protagonist must narrate something to reveal the bond between the protagonist and their father, as well as their corresponding relationship with music.
• The scene will then take a shift and begin explaining otosclerosis--the genetic disease that caused the protagonists father to lose his hearing. The narration will explain that their father was an aspiring musician like them but had to give it up. 
• The next shot will cut back to the initial setting and reveal that under the protagonist's headphones there is a hearing aid...the narration will divulge the main conflict of the movie that will follow: the musician has inherited his/her father's disease and will continue to lose her hearing.

The plot conflict will be introduced when
the main character reveals their hearing aid