So I bumped into my old friend Adam who is now studying film at SAE and after congratulating him on his latest achievement of winning Best Film at the 48 hour Film Festival, I was ecstatic to hear that he needed someone from the audio department to help produce music for a short film.
(Image 1, Adam centre)
#status is a short contemporary horror film which tells the story of a young girl whose life is turned around when technology decides to take over. The film is in its final stages however there is no music to accompany this wonder piece, which is where I come in. A mutual friend of ours, Travis, is a trained Jazz musician and will be collaborating with us in the studio.
The first important decision for me in this project was to figure out which studio would be best suited. After much thought, I came to the conclusion that since the new upgrade in the Post-Pro I would be silly not to take advantage of that.
In this project I played to my strengths and used Ableton as the main DAW, it’s audio/video compatibility and extensive list of MIDI instruments was a great asset to this production.
WORKFLOW
The Post-Production Suite became our home for approximately 15 hours throughout that week, we had a great setup and team. I manned the DAW, equipment, routing and editing on the fly whilst artist Travis poured his soul into a 49 key AKAI MIDI keyboard. Adam was on set directing us with his thoughts in each little section we worked on.
Once we were settled and ready to go, we spent a decent amount of time compiling all of the potentially usable synth patches, drum sounds and Kontakt instruments, essentially creating our own unique sound pallet.
With a whopping 55 tracks in our arsenal, we started the composition with mostly bass type patches and we would work on the more complex climactic parts, building it up from the bass all the way to the strings one layer at a time.
Once we had a decent overview of the composition, we then filled in the blanks and added some subtle textures throughout the less intense sections of score and film.
Each session was a constant reiteration of recording and editing, to me this was great because I learnt how to work in Ableton a lot faster, using more and more shortcuts and just really doing my best to keep up with the endless spontaneous commands from Travis and Adam. One second we would lay down some Timpani’s and then next we would be pitch automating the string section.
Just to give you an idea of how grand this project was, we had one string section playing legato consisting of 5 separate instruments all multi-output routed from a singular instance of Kontakt. Another of the same but this time 5 instruments played Tremolo, once again all multi-output from another instance of Kontakt. A few layer of Timpani’s, at least 10 various bass synths, drones and subs. A couple of piano’s, another 10 or so synth textures, then there were the digital sounding static synths and even more.
If you are ever thinking of using a Kontakt library in any DAW, I would highly recommend learning how to route properly so that you can use fewer instances of Kontakt. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Kontakt, it is huge and CPU hungry! Multi-Output routing will dramatically reduce CPU usage and make your session much much smoother.
If you would like to watch the film you can do so here 🙂
https://drive.google.com/a/student.sae.edu.au/file/d/0BwiAEOunJP91aDktTm50cHhKa0E/view
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