Daniel Marin Morejon – Page 6 – Daniel Marin Morejon Year 2

Drone Machine project.

Organise / Think / Plan / Explore This unit offers you plenty of scope to expand upon your existing sonic praxis. Reflect upon what that is for you right now.

Where are you going with your creative work? What are your motivations? What are you excited about? Is there anything that worries you? What regular (daily) action can you take to move forward? Our habits define us.

After reviewing some sounds machines in class like the electric guitar, an arp, a noise box and some other things I was really interested by a homemade synth on a wooden box and I thought that I could create a drone machine with this kind of enclosure. This is a project that I always wanted to recreate and I’ve done similar things in the past so I think that will be manageable for me to create this device.

Brainstorm

Here I found some images of how more or less I’d like the device to be. About the the internal functioning I’m still a bit dubious whether to make it an analog machine or maybe something based on Pure Data or the Bela platform. But I really enjoyed the wooden box as well so I think that the case will look like that.

Youtube Inspo

These are some examples, found on Youtube, of what could look like the device I’m looking for.

Week 1 – The Victorian Synth

On this first class on the unit Expanded Studio Practice for 21st Century Sound Artist, we’ve been experimenting with a kind of “noise machine” which consists on a speaker drive connected to a 9v battery. The battery polarity make the speaker to move forward or backwards depending on the voltage orientation and connected with alligator clips we can activate the circuit every time we put together the two ends of the wires.

Then we have found other elements like clips, screws, chains and other metallic or plastics noisy objects around the studio and tried different setups around the screen of the speaker. When activating the circuit repeatedly these objects kind of “jump” in various directions making a wide variety of noises and also creating a feedback where the whole system shakes and can’t stop activating the circuit by itself again and again. Definitely a very special technique and an interesting experiment.

Storytelling with Sound

Having chosen your film, please update your blog by posting a still of your film choice, the title, director and year it was made. Please write a paragraph about why you chose the film, what it is about and how you are approaching the sound design.

After having a look at some possible choices for a sound design exercise, I came up with a couple of them, from which I’m not really sure which one I’ll be finally choosing. However, I’m thinking that I could be using a combination of them, in order to achieve a multi tonal piece of experimental film where I would make use of diverse techniques that we’re learning during this term as well as enhance my creativity and even video editing skills. Here is a short description about each of the films I found.

This one is my favourite so far for some reason, it’s a 2013 conceptual film from Dennis Didinger, a German filmmaker. I love the urban takes and there is also some scenes where sound design takes importance so I think it would fit really well with what I want to do.

65 is a Sci-fi film released this year by director Adam Drive, and music by Chris Bacon. This would fit really well for a more traditional film sound design and score exercise.

Hidden is an amazing short film created by Uygar Genc in 2022. Surprisingly, the same director is composing the score and the sound. I love the nature environment, would be great for some Foley sounds.

This is a 1974 experimental film by Margaret Tait and my choice from the proposed films for the unit. I’m delighted by the vintage look of it, the original music and looks good for some sound design too. I think that I’ll be combining some scenes from this film for my project.

Week 3: Foley Exercise

During this third week in the Unit of Sound for Screen we have been practicing Foley techniques. We attended in groups to an induction session of the recording studio and then also performed some recordings over an excerpt of We Need to Talk About Kevin. In small groups we were told to book the studio space and finish the Sound Design of this little scene, we arranged a meeting then and worked on Foley effects on our own, achieving this result:

I think I’m quite happy with the result, we need to think that this was just the work of two hours (Actually just one because we spent quite a lot time to setup Pro tools) but the most important thing is that we enjoyed the session and realised how this technique works and how important a smooth team work is. I really looking forward to similar exercise and I have to say that Foley is an exciting and interesting area of work within Sound Design and Audio Post Production for film.

Genetic Automata

I’ve been visiting this week this recommended exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, it features 4 short films by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy among some other artistic works. The gallery explores diverse fields of science, DNA ancestry and video games topics. I was honestly delighted by the CGI graphics in the films as well as the soundtracks, going from ambient sounds to more techno orientated beats and synthesiser sounds. Highly recommended.

Week 2: Outdoors Recording and Listening Exercises

During the first (Brief) lesson due to strikes and the second class, we’ve been using a wide range of different microphones and sound recorders in order to capture some of the sounds that we can find around the college. We also followed some listening exercises where we’ve analysed the sounds surrounding us and represented them on a piece of paper in the form of a drawing.

It is worth to mention the verbal ID technique, which means to include some spoken info at the beginning of each recording, as a description of the sound. This will save us a lot of time later, and we can label the recording accordingly later on as well.

Here are some recording and some pictures of the recording sessions:

Outdoors Playground

Outdoors Playground 2

Outdoors Door Slamming

Outside in the park w/ Construction

Outside Traffic

Outside Water Flow

Outside Water Flow 2

Week 1

Please chose a film/ artistic work about place/environment and add it to your blog to share next week. Consider the soundtrack.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Very vintage choice of film but very interesting for me as it is credited to have been the first soundtrack entirely made with electronic equipment. This score was composed by “The Barrons”, a couple of electronic music pioneers whose studio was probably the first electronic music studio in New York. This was just the beginning for other Sci-Fi scores like Blade Runner, Star Wars, Avatar or Stranger Things to name a few. I love this kind of sound tracks because they feature computer generated and synthesiser sound effects and compositions.