Entry 5 (07.05.22)
Updated: May 11, 2022
This week was another busy week on Wednesday(04/05), like last week, we continued recording our songs. Wednesday we had dedicated to recording 'Wish you were here' by Pink Floyd which was our choice of song for the stage Depression. I left my house at 7.40am drove to my project teammate Dan's house picked him up and loaded up his equipment and headed onwards to our other teammate Bluebells house to record. We arrived at around 9.30-10am, and started setting up our equipment to record. We set up similarly to last week plugging the Scarlett 4i4 interface into Bluebells laptop into Logic Pro X, and we plugged in a midi keyboard to help us with the recording process. Dan had recorded 3 guitar parts for this song in his own time at home as we knew we had less time today due to our meeting with Dan Fox. Firstly, we imported those files into Logic on Bluebells laptop and set the tempo on the project. After we had fiddled with placing the guitar files to make sure the timing was correct we started recording bass. Dan recorded bass today we recorded that in sections, this took less time than we were expecting and we decided some organ & piano would sound nice on the track. We concluded we had enough time to record this as well as vocals before we had to leave so Bluebell did some improvisation with an organ sound on her keyboard and we all felt like it added to the atmosphere of the emotion we were trying to convey, depression. Finally we recorded vocals and it went fairly smoothly we even tried to add two voices to areas and recorded some sections twice, however the timing & phrasing was slightly different so we revisited this and copied the original recording and gave it a slight delay to thicken out the vocals.
We then had a quick lunch and left Bluebells house to meet Dan Fox the theatre technician to experiment with our fabric with him. We hung up our poly-cotton up on some stands he found and tried our three different lights. The first light we tried was a standard outside builder light, which Dan Fox told us heated up rather quickly and dependant on time could just turn off, whilst we quite liked the orange tint to the light we didn't want to risk the light turning off half way through the show so we decided against this one. The second light we tried was a Theatre light called a 'Parcan Strand par64' which we did like and was our first option until we saw the third light, which was a 'Fresenel Selecon Rama 150' another theatre light.
Builders light^ Parcan^ Fresenel^
Videos of Fresnel light (1st choice)
We felt the Fresnel was the best as it was faded around the outsides of the screen but brightest in the centre, it also gave the most control, being able to fade it on and off rather than just turn it on or off which was something we were looking for. We also put a blue theatre gel over the light which we decided would be a cool effect for stages Denial through to Depression and then have the bare light which is more yellow during Acceptance symbolising happiness.
Thursday (05/05) was a quieter day than Wednesday but we spent most of the day busy recording again. We started recording our song for the stage Bargaining 'Iris' by GooGoo Dolls around 9.30am and started with guitar, then bass. This took some retakes and some time but we got it done with minimal problems. After we'd had lunch Zen Taylor one of our peers from college called around with his guitar pedals and electric guitar which turned out to be very useful for us. In the song Iris there is a section where there is an electric guitar with lots of effects on which creates an atmospheric section, we had planned to cut this as we didn't have access to pedals we needed, however Zen did. So we used Zens pedals and guitar to record the electric guitar section in the song which we were all happy about. Dan and Zen experimented with the pedals after finding the appropriate sound, which was somewhat similar to a synth sound, Dan recorded the section and we were able to move onto vocals. We recorded the main vocals which didn't take too long but as a group we decided we were going to record backing vocals another day as we were all exhausted from the long day of recording. However, in my opinion my vocals on this song are my favourite we've recorded so far, I haven't been totally happy with my vocals in the tracks up to now but have settled to help us stick to our timetable. Today however, I had warmed up for longer and used the piano to familiarise myself with the notes I was going to sing, additionally the song was the most in my range out of all the songs we have recorded so far which definitely also helped. In the future before recording I will be warming up for longer and familiarising myself with the notes on the piano or guitar before singing.
On Friday (06/05)we were back in college, and Dan was out doing a performance for Primary School children as part of a project called 'Music on the Move', this left Bluebell and I at college so we decided to storyboard and try and get as much of that and our script done as possible. We were storyboarding from 9.30 to 11.30, our method of story boarding was listening to our recordings (& the unrecorded on Spotify) and drawing our 6 boxes per stage and brainstorming then drawing actions we wanted to take place as the music went along. We did this in chronological order, so starting with the intro then Denial, we knew we wanted the whole room dark for the heartbeat intro so we drew that and then showed how we will transition into Denial. We came up with the idea that the person grieving could interact with the person they are grieving but thought to display the person they were interacting with was dead we would place them exclusively next to the grave. This is similar to a Brecht (theatre practitioner) technique where you use different props to determine different characters, in this situation the grave is the prop. We also experimented with idea of actions matching the beat of music, for example in Anger the character hits the floor to the same beat to the song. After we storyboarded it we roughly acted it along the music and made a few adaptations, whilst making this adaptions we had the idea to have a hotline number as the last thing shown on the screen (even though we were intending to put on on the programs we are handing out as the audience enter). We then had another idea about charging a small amount (exp £3) for tickets or taking donations to donate to a charity which supports those grieving. Bluebell and I did some initial research into charities and found that Cruse Bereavement Care was a popular charity, however only pencilled this as an idea as we hadn't ran this through with Dan yet and we decided to make decisions as a group so wanted to stay true to that, however when we did bring it up with him later he was supportive of the idea.
Storyboards^
I then started writing these storyboards into a script with timestamps I haven't got very far into this yet but will continue this over the next couple of days. I thinking the storyboarding process went well however it would've been helpful to have Dan around to do it with us. In this instance we didn't know until the week before that Dan was going to be away this Friday however in future projects I will try anticipate team members being unavailable at short notice so that we can plan to do more individual based parts of the project when we have members away.
I think as a whole the week went very well however there are certain parts I would change, I would prefer to have started this whole process earlier so we had less stressful and busy weeks so we can focus and perfect everything in the recording process a bit more but due to our large project and time limit we have had to squeeze everything in. Perhaps the project was a little unrealistic but because of our group being so hard-working we have are making it happen in an organised way and are problem solving our time limit problem effectively. Despite us problem solving this well in the future with projects I will try and choose more realistic projects so I can ensure the upmost quality to every section in a calm and reflective manner rather than a stressed one.
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