FIRST CUT - Alone

This is our first cut of our Media AS project 'Alone'.

 

Music

We have decided that we want a child singing a nursery rhyme in the background of the opening titles. We feel that this will give it a twisted and uneasy feeling as we normally think of nursery rhymes as fun and happy things to sing. 

The inspiration behind us using a little girl singing is from 'The Women in Black' film opening because we like the use of the girls singing in the background. 

The song we have chosen is called 'Ring around a Rosy' 
These are the lyrics: 

Ring around the rosy
A pocketful of posies
''Ashes, Ashes''
We all fall down

We found this example of youtube of what we want it to sound like: 

As you can hear the tone of her voice is quite creepy and because its slower it makes it much more eery. 

We are going to record a few girls, including our Actor Lily singing this and then we will choose the best one to put onto the soundtrack. 

Score

In our early brainstorms, we discussed the idea of using a nursery rhyme as a component of our score for our opening, as it would fit well with themes of children and innocence, and if we could warp and distort the nursery rhyme, it would support the fact that the little girl is also warped and twisted.
One of the props suggested was also a small, old music box, so I have also tried to incorperate this into the score.
I experimented using garage band, and began by recording the melody of the nusery rhyme ring a ring o roses using the onscreen keyboard, with the instrument set to grand piano (Default)

 Ten I experimented by turning up the echo and reverb levels and the track below is with the reverb as high as it would go.

I also made the track more slick by correcting my timing mistakes by using the edit tool, which allows you to change the time, pitch and velocity of notes individually (see below)

 

I then tried adding another layer of a very low continious note, as a drone, as this is often used in the scores of horror films. I tried all of the piano types, and decided out of all them, retro bass was the best. So I added a long continious note on the bottom, however I discovered it is not possible to do a very long fade which is one of the things I wanted to try as I wanted to fade up so gradually the audience didn't notice when it began, as this would build the tension and sense of unease.

 

 

 

I then used the built in sampler tool, and recorded a note from a music box so I could play it using the keyboard and recorded the melody of ring a ring o roses using the music box instrument.

 

 

 I also then used the small arrows above the keyboard to transpose it downward, so it wasn't as high pitched.

 

After showing these to the rest of the group we decided to begin with just the low music box for one verse, then repeat with the drone, then repeat with a child singing over the top, as this will link with our young girl character and make the score more relevant to the storyline, and will also help to slowly build up the tension throughout the opening, as because of our non-linear stucture we begin the story just before the climax in the narrative so there needs to be high tension.