I did two collaborations with Design & Animation students from Curtin University this semester. For collaboration one, I worked on a 30 second animatic (a moving story reel) with a passionate animation student using a scene from a table top roleplaying game. They were very specific with the mood and atmosphere they wanted from the music, using multiple references from soundtracks such as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which was cool and very handy for getting an idea of the stripped back instrumentation they wanted). After I played around with the timing of the piece using Logic's movie mode, I did a spot of mixing and spatialising then submitted it, asking about feedback and any changes they wanted. They were extremely chuffed with it and asked for no further edits. It was really useful to have such specific instructions and being very familiar with the style of music they wanted me to create.
"I got the opportunity to collaborate with Hannah for one of my university assignments for animation and visual special effects. The music created for my project was brilliant in its simplicity and fit perfectly with the visuals I had created. Thanks to clear communication from both parties and understanding of what we wanted to create, we made a wonderful piece of art that I was proud of," Robin, 2nd Year Animator. For privacy reasons, I won't post the full animatic itself, BUT you can listen to the track right "here". The second collaboration was with another Curtin University student in their first year of Design and Animation. They had an interesting assignment that they chose to do - they did a speed paint of a score, missing the latter half of its lines and notes as audio plays of myself trying to sight read it to varying degrees of success. It was interesting how hands on this collaboration was. I am lead to believe my slight incompetence with sight-reading was entertaining and added to the art piece. As the notes slowly faded away, most of the sight reading became a memory test and guess work and where the notes where supposed to be. "Hannah helped by collaborating with me for a uni assignment by sight-reading my art composition titled Coda. She was invaluable to the piece as she put her own interpretation of lineless sheet music at short notice!" Coda, 1st Year Design & Animation student. The finished speed-paint / score I sight read can be found below; audio linked "here."
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Here's the final draft of the song for the dance collaboration. The Soundcloud link can be found here.
Some of the problems I ran into when arranging and editing the song was that it felt too full and simultaneously too empty. I couldn't quite figure out how to fix this until I had someone else give me a second opinion. They said the low end needed some support as it was quite condensed at the top end. Another suggestion was the lessen the accapella vocals during the verses which was extremely useful. After going back in and reworking it, I ended up being much more satisfied with the final product. The footage of the full collaboration should be up in a few days and I'm pretty excited to see how it turns out! After sending Ayesha the acoustic demo of what I was planning, she sent back a list of instructions on what she liked, what she wanted to alter and what she wanted to emphasise. The email can be seen below. I was pleasantly surprised at how much positive direction she was giving me and that I understood what she was talking about. I have often been told that the dissonance in communication between musicians and their non-musician collaborators can be strained at times. However, as Ayesha has such a strong dance background and well founded love of music anyway, she knew exactly what she wanted me to do and how to say it in the best way she could.
All of these instructions and notes I took to heart and began working with them in mind. The assurance she had that I would know what to do to "fix" aspects of the song was quite touching. It definitely helped to fuel me further. This semester, I'm doing a collaboration with dancer and cinematographer, Ayesha Norcross. Her emotive and contemporary dance approach matches well with my style of lyric driven composition.
We met up on the 9th March to discuss the collaboration and how we approach composing for music / dance. Over and over again, Ayesha reinforced this idea of letting the music "breathe". The pauses between beats. A change in pace. The rise and fall in melody. Below, are notes I took during this discussion. The main take aways for me, were to place an emphasis on DYNAMICS and PULSE. This was also made important due to her love of acoustic hip hop stylings, where pulse and rhythm is key for the laid back sound. From this, I decided to play around with the physicality of breathing through accapella - letting the dancer and musician breathe together. |
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Artist SummaryI'm a WA Fremantle based singer-songwriter / composer. Here, you can have a gawk at my studies, compositions and performances. Archives
August 2022
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