Friday, 23 March 2012

Liverpool Beatles



For this project we decided to do a documentary on the Beatles as we were in Liverpool. We started this project with an awful lot of research, we all watched as many different documentaries to get a good jist of what the people of liverpool think about them. we used this documentaries and research to help us gather good questions to ask the public aswel as Beates experts.

Filming
The day we arrived in Liverpool we knew Mathew Street was the first place to go. We went to the Hard Days Night Beatles gift shop first where we interviewed a man who helped us greatly and let us film as much as we wanted. We then went into the world famous Cavern club and pub. where we met another  man who let us film him and his friends and film the Cavern club. This was a really good start for us, we had 3 very good interviews in perfect locations and some excellent shot of the club, pub , gift shop and Mathew street. after we had our main interviews we went all over liverpool getting some nice shots to fill up the interviews, so shots of the docks, we got some shots of strawberry fields aswel as interviews of members of the public, although didn't use any of them. overall i believe the filming part of the project went as well as it possibly could have.

Editing
editing was the most difficult part as always, we didn't really have any problems in particular with editing, the only issue we had was the structure of the project. so knowing what order we should show everything was the main issue we had. we wanted to keep the audience interested so we tried to stay away of just having loads of shots of people talking, we added nice cut aways aswel as a brief clip of the Beatles playing in the Cavern. We also filmed some buskers in liverpool so we could cut away to them to keep the audience interested. As we couldn't use Beatles songs due to copy right i got my mate to record some Beatles songs for me on his acoustic guitar and i believe those really helped as having a Beatles documentary and having no music init would really not have worked.

Overall i hink our project has worked really well and im pleased to have been apart of it.

The Beatles documentaries we looked at.



The Beatles Abbey Road Documentary


A Hard Day's Night

The Beatles had a successful film career, beginning with A Hard Day's Night (1964), a loosely scripted comic farce, sometimes compared to the Marx Brothers in style. A black-and-white film, it focused on Beatlemania and the band's hectic touring lifestyle and was directed by the up-and-coming Richard Lester, who was known for having directed a television version of the successful BBC radio series The Goon Show as well as the off-beat short film The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. A Hard Day's Night is a mockumentary of the four members as they make their way to a London television programme. The film, released at the height of Beatlemania, was well-received by critics, and remains one of the most influential jukebox musicals.







Help!In 1965 came Help!; an Eastmancolour extravaganza, which was also directed by Lester. The film was shot in exotic locations (such as Salisbury Plain, withStonehenge visible in the background; the Bahamas; and Salzburg and the Tyrol region of the Austrian Alps) in the style of a Mr. Magoo spoof along with even more Marx Brothers-style zaniness: For example, the film is dedicated "to Elias Howe, who, in 1846, invented the sewing machine." It was the first Beatles film filmed in colour.





Magical Mystery TourThe Magical Mystery Tour film was essentially McCartney's idea, which was thought up as he returned from a trip to the U.S. in the late spring of 1967, and was loosely inspired by press coverage McCartney had read about Ken Kesey's Merry PrankstersLSD-fuelled American bus odyssey. McCartney felt inspired to take this idea and blend it with the peculiarly Englishworking class tradition of charabanc mystery tours, in which children took chaperoned bus rides through the English countryside, destination unknown. The film was critically dismissed when it was aired on the BBC's premier television network, BBC-1, on Boxing Day — a day primarily for traditional "cosy, family entertainment". While the film has historical importance as an early advance into the music video age, at the time many viewers found it plotless and confusing. Compounding this culture clash was the fact that the film was made in colour and made use of colour filters for some of the scenes - particularly in a sequence for "Blue Jay Way". In December 1967 practically no-one in the UK owned a colour receiver, the service only having started a few months earlier.






Yellow SubmarineThe animated Yellow Submarine followed in 1968, but had little direct input from The Beatles, save for a live-action epilogue and the contribution of five new songs (including "Only a Northern Song", an unreleased track from the Sgt. Pepper sessions). It was acclaimed for its boldly innovative graphic style and especially stinging pangs of heartbreak, along with the soundtrack. The Beatles are said to have been pleased with the result and attended its highly publicised London premiere. Regarding the voices provided by voice actors for The Beatles in the film, each one of The Beatles thought his own voice was not quite right, whilst saying that the other three were perfect.







Let It BeLet It Be was an ill-fated documentary of the band that was shot over a four-week period in January 1969. The documentary — which was originally intended to be simply a chronicle of the evolution of an album and the band's possible return to live performances — captured the prevailing tensions between the band members, and in this respect it unwittingly became a document of the beginning of their break-up.
The band initially rejected both the film and the album, instead recording and issuing the Abbey Road album. But with so much money having been spent on the project, it was decided to finish, and release, the film and album (the latter with considerable post-production by Phil Spector) in the spring of 1970. When the film finally appeared, it was after the break-up had been announced, which gave the film's depiction of the band's acrimony and attempts to recapture the group's spirit a significant poignancy.



Thursday, 15 December 2011

TRIMPIN: the sound of invention

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKpENG_qRXE&feature=player_embedded#!
the man on here is pretty cool in the way hes created a large instrument and experiments with sounds that no one else has thought of doing before. the sounds that come from this sound very sci-fi and surreal and it shows that sounds can be created in different ways, even by experimenting with previous instruments there are about.

Motion and Audio Experiments Video

http://vimeo.com/1619106
after finding this link on the internet, I found this video really interesting in the way it looks at the use of accompanying sound and music in the way it reflects what is being shown. By this i mean, the word 'Crush' is animated using sound effects we'd associate with this word to back up the meaning and action within the clip. If a more calmer tone was used, it probably wouldn't hav desired affect of appearing to 'crush' or explode.

sense of space project-our idea.

Our idea was basically to get the sound of effects for a murder/ raid. we recorded our footage over 2 days gathering noises from the roads, the rainfall a busy city centre as well as lots of car noises, footsteps, digging sounds and many more.
Our story was about a man who the audience doesn't know any thing about. you hear him get into a car and start driving. there is then a loud banging at the door, we hear a man scream and what sounds like a sword to this house owners chest. the man continues to murder him by smashing his skull. these noises were created by us smashing a pumpkin with a bat. the man then enters the house and trashes the place as if he looking for something. we then hear the man drag the body to his car and he drives away. He then gets out of his car and it is raining heavily, we hear the body being dragged across the floor. there is then a pause. this was to help the tension build up. we then hear loud digging noises, this goes on for a few seconds just before we hear sirens coming in from behind. these police sirens get louder and louder and then it suddenly ends.
we used quite a few atmosphere tracks to get a good ambient sound through out the whole story.

Wednesday, 14 December 2011

Chris Watson



http://www.chriswatson.net/
Chris Watson. net allowed me to look more closely at the sounds captured by the sound artist Chris Watson. seems a lot of his works capture the sounds most associated with natural environment, creating peaceful and natural images in the listener's head. A lot of his sounds capture birds and sounds we are so use to hearing we overlook and dont pay attention too as they are really familiar. Only when we hear these sounds (bird calling, wind, bell chimes) out of context, when we're not actually in that setting but maybe in the comfort of our own home do we pay attention to what we first would have missed.

Favourite sounds research

on StumbleUpon I came across this website. http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2SGJ5Z/favoritechicagosounds.com/soundmaps.php/ it shows the creators explorin sounds with the use of a map of Chicago.  explore what sounds people prefer all over the city. This to me is an interesting and very visually exciting way of storing the sound preferences ofpeople, and looking at sounds other people might ignore and storing it all together. This could be very valuable information because if someone wanted to create sound or use sound within a piece of film or music they would want to know what their audience likes or links different noises with. each snippet of conversation is also very interesting to read by itself.