I wrote something in a previous post about my love of Werner Herzog's use of music in his films, especially choral music. He seems to be able to synthesise imagery and sound into a single creation in a way that very few films achieve. The Wild Blue Yonder is a film that really seems to divide people (it's won awards and also appeared on 'worst films of all time' lists), but the soundtrack is extraordinary. He also made a short documentary - 'Requiem in Space' - which shows how he worked with the remarkably diverse set of musicians - a Senegalese solo singer, a small choir of Sardinian shepherds and a Dutch jazz cellist - which the second two short clips are taken from.
Took these pictures today down at West Wittering beach in West Sussex. A proper beach. Grassy dunes, beach huts, low tide, ripples in the sand, dogs chasing sticks, sandcastles, seaweed, kites, cups of tea. OK, so there are 12, not 10. I can't count.
Would love to have the time and the patience to make some films like the ones below but for now I'll stick to photos. These were taken in Nice, Poland, Portofino, Austin, Lviv, Oxfordshire, New York and Venice. They look better if you click to enlarge.
Since discovering a few years ago that I'm synaesthesic, I've been really interested in how [or if] it affects what I do creatively, particularly with regard to writing music. I don't have any of the really extreme kinds of synaesthesia, like hearing certain words and tasting mustard or smelling cheese - that would be really insane - but I do have the more common types. Here's how I experience it:
I have colours for most (but not all) letters of the alphabet.
I have colours for most (but not all) numbers 1 to 9.
I have colours for all days of the week and months of the year.
I experience or 'sense' people very strongly by the 'colour' of their name. For example, my mum is green, my dad is maroon and my brother is orange. The first letter of the person's name lends the biggest influence, but the other letters give the overall effect a 'tinge'. For example, my friend Krzys is bright blue, because I experience both 'K' and 'R' as different shades of blue and the second 'R' letter just reinforces the first, adding to the overall effect. My friend Katharine however, is much more of a purply-blue, because I experience 'A' as a deep red, and there's a kind of 'bleeding' effect between letters, which subtly changes things.
When I think of letters, numbers, days or months, I see them laid out before me in space, in a specific, never-changing pattern. For example January (grassy green) is behind my left ear, September (pale peachy orange) is over by my right arm.
With music, I have colours for chords and key signatures, but not really for individual notes. And I only really experience these when I'm playing the music myself, not when I'm listening to it. If I'm playing Chopin's Nocturne No.2 in E Flat major on the piano, I experience a warm, creamy-coloured 'mist' around me. It's hard to explain. If it were in E, rather than E Flat, then it would be brilliant white. The key of D major is forest green, the key of A major is dark red, F is brown, B is orange...
I experience different instrumental timbres as different textures, as well as different colours. For example, a flute (soft grey) sounds/feels like touching felt, whereas a piccolo (white) sounds/feels like polished marble, and an oboe (earthy purply brown) sounds/feels like dry twigs.
The colours that I experience are *extremely* precise. They are exact and specific shades. For the last three years, I've tested myself on a synaesthesia research website, where you get to select your colours from a total colour spectrum, and my results have remained more than 97% consistent each time I've done it.
It makes me feel very uncomfortable, uneasy, and sometimes almost a bit physically sick to read or see other synaesthetes' descriptions of their own colours for the same things, because they are just plain wrong, wrong, wrong!
It might be just coincidence, and it actually feels ridiculous writing this, but there are some people with specific letters/colours/names that I feel drawn to. For example, within the circle of people I know, I feel very comfortable, calm and at ease with those whose names begin with K, P, D, J, R - all different shades of blue or green - and find that I have slightly more difficult, awkward or antagonistic relationships with people whose names start with G, M, T, A - all browns and angry reds.
As I look back at pieces of music that I've written over the years, I'm starting to notice some patterns in terms of keys that I often use, chord progressions that I find compelling, instrumentation, etc. I'm wondering if subconsciously I've made creative choices based on not wanting colours to 'clash', or steering clear of particular keys or timbres whose corresponding colours I find a bit yucky. (I know that this is true in other areas of life - for example, if a friend gets married and changes their name, it takes me ages to accept because suddenly they are a whole different colour. When my friend Katharine got married she suddenly had a completely clashing first name and surname, which grated for years. I breathed a sigh of relief when she got divorced and went back to her maiden name.)
I became even more aware of all this when I first started getting really interested in writing music for film, or for the accompaniment of any visuals. I've looked back at some examples, and it seems in nearly all cases that the chosen key and instrumentation has been heavily influenced by the dominant colour of what's happening on screen. It seems obvious that this would be the case, really, but I'd not really examined it before. I'm not sure if this matters or not. Perhaps it's a good thing. Or perhaps it means that I'm massively limiting myself. I guess that now I'm more aware of it, I can keep it in check.
However, unlike the woman in this video, I don't think it's got anything to do with God.
I hiked up this glacier a few years ago. When we started at the very bottom it was quite sunny and warm, but within an hour the weather had changed to monstrous, bitter winds, icy rain and snow. It was hard work; a steady but slippery uphill climb, navigating fissures and crevasses and holes. But worth it to witness the amazing colours and textures of the ice.
Keith Loutit is a Sydney-based photographer. These are my favourite three of his films. I've had a lot of fun making some tiltshift photos which I'm quite pleased with, but the thought of the editing hours and the amount of shots that must have gone into making these shorts is mindboggling.
This is a reject from the last film I was working on, which I've just rediscovered while deleting a load of old files. I've decided that I quite like the chords and am going to play around with it a bit more and see if I can salvage something. I'm toying with the idea of bringing in a very soft, muted brass band-ish element as it repeats. Might post back some ideas soon.
Walther Ruttman was an experimental German film director working in the 1920s and 30s, who originally studied architecture but became a graphic designer before moving into film. This short film is probably his best known work, and I'm currently playing around with writing a new score for a ten minute section of it.
This is a brief excerpt from a short film I made last year. The film is made almost entirely from old family Super8 footage shot in the late 60s and early 70s. I love the special, nostalgic quality of Super8; the graininess, the vignetting of the periphery, the flickering and the flaws. This excerpt here is the very final scene; the end credits. The soundtrack for the film was constructed entirely in Logic, and the full version also contains a fair amount of live audio and found sounds, including insect and birdsong, stream and river noises, children playing, traffic, trees and general chatter. For complete authenticity, I recorded all the sounds myself, in the exact same places where the original footage was shot, which was a bit of a labour of love as it was hundreds of miles away. These final credits were a bit trickier, however, so the aircraft sounds were sourced elsewhere. The most difficult part of this sequence was the sound design for the planes - getting the right sound for the right type of plane, and trying to get the spatial and surround elements right - attempting to follow the planes' trajectory, etc. The text on this clip is too small, has a nasty drop shadow and is just not how I want it. I'll change it one day when I get round to deciding on a better typeface.
