Blog 1: project introduction

My Final major project is titled Lens; it is a soundtrack to a film that does not exist. This project will have four key milestones, Film story sketch and spotting, Sound design research, Music creation, Report research and writing. Producing a story to spot is the absolute first step for this project as it is frequent practice to spot a film before you start producing your cues.  

While spotting a film you must look for moments in the visual to place your cues. Since this project subverts the hierarchy between audio and visual i will be approaching spotting differently. I will be doing this by producing a script for this project and then spotting this script to get my 4 major cues. This story will be based on the emotions I feel during the process of making music. I have narrowed down my feelings into four stages. Confusion, clarity, joy, and despair, these will be the main emotional arcs in the soundtrack.  

I then take these four moments and list out how I feel in these stages while producing. These feelings are my guidelines/cues for producing. Now that I have these main feelings, I will write a script which stems from these feelings to create my film settings, directions, and scenes. This script will not include dialogue as there are no characters in this film.  

I first produced a storyboard using film stills from my proposal presentation and arranged them to get some feeling of continuity. Then I formulated captions for these images, these captions really helped to bring the story to life. I asked chat GPT to write me a script based on these captions. Chat GPT then produced a detailed script based on the 11 captions I gave it. I then grouped These 11 “scenes” into groups of 3 so I have my four major cues. Each cue has 3 scenes which will help me produce the tracks.  

While the chat gpt script is great i feel like the lack of control in producing the script may sway the project in a different direction, to avoid this problem i will make sure to only use the AI generated script as a rough guideline to create my main musical ideas, as the ideas take shape i will edit and rewrite the script according to my own vision for the soundtrack.