Program - Liveness in a Virtual World

Creative Music Technology:

LIVENESS IN A VIRTUAL WORLD Wednesday 29 May : Ian Hanger Recital Hall BIOSPHERE

Ethan Waller, Morgan Chippendale, Eden Shepherd

Biosphere, created by Eden Shepherd, Morgan Chippendale, and Ethan Waller, is an audiovisual project, blending music and film to explore the musical inspirations that can arise from the environments surrounding us. In this course we have developed our skills by learning how to film, record and then edit this footage, with heavy emphasis on the use of diegetic sounds, fast cuts, and transitions. Biosphere is an audiovisual experience which embodies that and is a culmination of all that we have learned in this course.

The goal of our work Biosphere is to showcase original music being created in different environments, with its musical characteristics being influenced by the visual characteristics of the locations depicted in the video. Furthermore, highlighting the contrast between natural environments and more urbanised ones was one of the driving factors behind our creative process. For less manmade environments such as beaches and forests, we have incorporated more organic samples of water and leaves, as well as serene, more acoustic instrumentation. This is contrasted with the more mechanical, harsh, and unabashedly electronic production that makes an appearance later on, reflective of the more man-made environments showcased in the latter half of Biosphere.

While Biosphere explores a variety of unique locations, it retains a generally bright and saturated visual aesthetic throughout, effectively capturing the vibrancy of these environments. This was achieved through colour correction, coupled with the overlaying of colourful visual effects and audio visualisers, which also serve to visually depict the varying energy of the music. Biosphere is similarly vibrant in a musical sense, consisting of five short tracks which are all connected and transition between one another seamlessly, and varying in musical style from ambient to harsh industrial EDM. Each section of the track seamlessly overlays samples from the environment into its composition, with the intention of immersing the audience in these environments, and creating a direct link between video and audio.

We hope you enjoy this project, and we hope it inspires you to draw inspiration from your natural environment in your own work, as we found this process very creatively fulfilling.

THE RIFTER

Ellee Chapman and Caitlin Mills

Step into an extraordinary audiovisual experience that will transform your perception of city life. In this immersive journey, The Rifter offers a visually stunning spectacle that challenges traditional notions of urban cinematography. Picture the bustling streets and serene parks of the city. This work captures these familiar scenes but infuses them with elements of symmetry, orientation, and fusion to create a kaleidoscopic marvel. This isn't just about what you see; it's about experiencing the city in a whole new way.

The Rifter, a mysterious female character, distorts reality, manipulating visuals and altering your perception of the urban environment. Through innovative camera angles, shot compositions, and visual effects, her chaotic influence comes to life. You'll see the cityscape like never before —dynamic, unpredictable, and utterly captivating. The accompanying soundscape blends city noises with upbeat rhythms and synths, echoing the Rifter's mischievous nature. Traffic, footsteps, and other urban sounds are woven into the music, creating a powerful synergy between audio and visuals. This dynamic interplay intensifies the sense of chaos and immersion.

In this work, you won't connect with a character but with the environment itself. City life has been captured at different times of day, presenting scenes that are both familiar and disorienting. This personal connection with the surroundings adds depth to the experience, making it both relatable and surreal. The use of creative editing techniques and the shot orientations, varying opacities, and experimenting with colours enhances the kaleidoscopic aesthetic. Each scene is a visual experiment, designed to captivate and intrigue.

This work is more than a film; it's a performance where the city becomes a canvas, and the Rifter is the artist. Her influence transforms the visuals and music, making you feel part of an ever-changing, dynamic experience. Explore the beauty in chaos, the harmony in dissonance, and the endless possibilities of a city transformed. This experience offers a reality that is fluid, with every moment bringing a new discovery.

EXTRANEOUS IDEATION Matt Rabbas, Josh Crawford and Connor Townson This project, Extraneous Ideation, explores the idea of external stimuli serving as the main driver of creativity. Our way of creation is intrinsically linked to our aural library, the memories of past musical or visual works, and informs the overall scope of the final project (Anthony, Creative Studio Practices II, 2022). Responding to this idea of an aural

library, we chose to portray process of synthesising a range of inspiration to produce an original work through character and visual style in the project.

This film follows a student who has discovered their new source of inspiration in the form of a red box. However, this new-found source of inspiration is haunted by a cloaked loudspeaker who represents the risk of uniformity and lack of new thought. This figure can be seen as a vessel for social media and its soapbox-like impact on our lives; whereby we lose control over our consumption and hand it over to an inhuman algorithm.

An FMV, video game style of editing has been used to immerse the viewer in a digital aesthetic, aligning with an underlying metaphor for social media, and the uniformity of the world around the student, including the cloaked loudspeaker. This was achieved by way of filters, glitching, and masking. The process of masking involves cropping out a moving section, and pasting it onto a still image, leaning into the obscurity and magic of the world. Adjectives such as barren and eerie are invited in the viewer, as one experiences the spaces in a grainy texture, and abnormally elevated vibrance and contrast. The pace of the audiovisual work, controlled predominately by shot length, rises and falls depending on the student’s intensity of emotions, ranging from curiosity, to infatuation, to confusion, to bliss, to fear, to desperation.

The idea Matt had for the music was to make it distorted and crunchy so that it would act as a musical representation of the grainy FMV-inspired video. Heavenly/divine themes are contrasted with sinister/dangerous sounding music so that the appearing characters have defined roles that can be interpreted clearly. The box, associated with divine melodies, represents fire given to humanity by Prometheus. Matt put together a handful of soft pads, choir samples and other ethereal sounds to represent this divinity whenever it showed on screen. To oppose those concepts, the speakerman’s music was made to sound sinister so that it could convey the idea that this character was more of a curse or an apparition than an actual physical threat.

ECLIPSE: AN AUDIO-VISUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Luke Sauvage and Jack Bolton JOURNEY

INTO

THE

DUALITY

OF

Eclipse, as a work, is an exploration within the framework of the audiovisual medium. It investigates the intricacies of human consciousness.

Within its layers of sound and imagery, Eclipse delves into the enigmatic forces that shape our inner worlds, inviting the audience to contemplate the complex interplay between the light and shadow within all of us.

Eclipse follows a character, riding the wake of a break up. Faced with a sense of loss, he's accompanied by his two friends. Together they explore avenues to shift his state of mind in the hope of finding relief and closure. Along the way the main character finds himself at a crossroad, forced to face the worst of himself.

As people we stumble through life, moving through heartbreak, changing jobs, friendships begin and end, we move cities, change our house decor and clothing. Before we know it, all the material things that are in front of us get swept away in our yesterdays. Eclipse begs for answers to questions like: How do we move through life healthily? How do those things define us? Who really are we?

Throughout Eclipse, viewers are invited to embark on a journey of selfdiscovery, navigating the turbulent waters of the main character's consciousness. Themes of loss, ethics, and the dichotomy of human nature are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the work, challenging audiences to confront the multifaceted aspects of their own identities.

The audio component of Eclipse serves as a sonic landscape, guiding listeners through a labyrinth of emotions and sensations. The work puts a focus on communicating the character’s state of mind using nondiegetic sound. Taking inspiration from silent movies of the 1910’s, limited scenes showcase diegetic dialog. Instead, conversations are scored using harmony and melody, to steer the focus away from the familiarity of language.

LOCKED IN

Joseph Cross, Liv Gadenne and Charlotte Lennon

Locked In is a story that uses visual and audio elements to help communicate a story of how someone can be impacted by mental health. The premise of this video will revolve around a girl who is depicted as someone struggling with her mental state and is constantly going in and out of her head. We demonstrate the different setting within this video by having a party scene to introduce the character in a normal reality, surrounded by people eating, drinking and making conversation. As this progresses, we start to emphasise the discomfort the girl is experiencing by distorting and editing audio elements, highlighting the lost sense of her surroundings before drastically being teleported to a blank white room. We use this to demonstrate what the girl is happening within her mind, and we further develop this by introducing instrumental elements to build upon the audio/compositional elements within our video. During this time, we also explore set development by slowly adding more shelving decorations and furniture to encapture the idea of a mind flowing with ideas and constantly

adapting.This was also used to connect the character to her real life, using props that remind her of the life she is living outside of her mind.

It was during these scenes we started to look into the unstable realty of our main character by having screaming voices to aid the music elements.

To help encapsulate this, we focused on producing a track that used nondiegetic elements combined from the party, and instruments that the main girl plays/sings to help build energy overtime. We supported this with a combination of diegetic sounds with heavy effects e.g. Saturation, Reverb and Delay from camera and zoom recording audio expanding on the idea of our character becoming overwhelmed. This idea of having these overwhelming elements help show the impacts on the main character, and gives the audience more of an idea of the state of her mental health. During this film, we have used colour correcting and post production elements to help create smoother transitions between different settings. For example, a green screen was used to show the character being transported through different environments, hinting that her mind is overstimulated. Paired with effects that make her visual look distorted allowed us to achieve this message more clearly. These editing elements enabled us to adjust the mood of each setting to improve the messaging behind the film.