12 // Considering the Track

I've spent the past day or so trying to gain a better understanding of the track I'm working with here; since I first heard it a few months ago, I recognised that it stirred some emotions in me which in turn led to my imagination coming up with all sorts of visual ideas, so I've been trying to make sense of these and get some of them down on paper.

I started off by getting the track into Audacity (music editing software) so that I had a graph of the track to use as a visual aid. By listening to the track repeatedly, I was able to break it down into its different sections and apply my thoughts to each in the hope that a narrative structure might begin to reveal itself. It was pretty easy for me to remember all my earlier ideas and visuals - my imagination seems to work like a sketchbook where I can store imagined shots/angles, especially if I make a note of it somewhere - so I went through this process a few times, making notes in Photoshop and in a notepad, trying to find questions - and answers - as I went.

This seemed to be working out pretty well, I was able to juggle a few different ideas and try to imagine visuals that might fit the track. It's a vague process as the only notes I get down are words/phrases that really mean anything to myself, so for anybody else reading it, it might not have the same effect. So far, at this stage, it's a quicker method than sketching, but I'm definitely going to have to get onto that really soon. For now though, my imagination is doing a pretty good job in conjunction with pages and pages of notes.

Also, since I'm using this stage as a means to try and figure out the narrative, I want to make sure I'm creating a world and story that makes sense and is plausible. The story has to be just right before I invest any more time in it, or else I'll just have to come up with something else. I'm pretty happy with what I'm coming up with so far though, so I think a bit more tweaking will get a good result.

Here are some of the notes I made:

When I started thinking about how the tempo of the track might influence the cuts and edits of the visual shots, I noticed that the speed of the music doesn't have a major shift; it seems to me that the build up of emotion comes from added instruments and pitch (I'm no musician, so I'm probably completely off the mark with that assumption, but that's kind of what I was getting from it). From all the notebook notes I've made on narrative ideas so far (which I'm not going to share until I've solved all the problems) it'll be the heightened emotion sections that feature the quickest shots and highest paced action scenes.

This might not have been the most efficient way to go about this kind of thing, but it's really helped me to figure out a lot of the problems early on, and gain some new ideas, so I'm happy to continue in this manner for a bit longer until I'm happy with where things are going.

This is just the start of my attempts to figure out the transition I want this animation to take, but I'll be looking into visual structure soon and seeing how that might have an effect on things. Something I want to try and focus on with this animation is to present a relatively straightforward story, but support it with transitions/twists in genre, colour, mood, emotion etc.