From Dan

Hi Ron,



Here are my quick notes on the sound:

On Saturday, January 22, 2005, at 12:06 AM, ron saito wrote:
Camera opens on things that Ben reads on his break. Perpetual motion pamphlet. Sandwich. Coffee.

This would seem to be mostly foley (or production sound---are you going to generate any production sound?). Should there be some sort of sonic indicator when the camera's showing something significant? That would be the traditional job of the music, but perhaps the blandness of incidental sounds coupled with visual emphasis on important items would set the tone more effectively.

Then we see Ben at his printing press. Printing and printing.

What is he printing? Is this related to the material he's reading or just an ordinary job? I guess what I'm asking is if the printing has import? If it's just his job, then perhaps a repetitive realistic sound would emphasize a kind of static effort (meaning that it's not a developmental effort with narrative import, but a sort of visual and sonic statement about the mechanistic world or some such). If it has import, then the printing press sound could progress in its various appearances.

Ben comes home. Goes through his ritual... takes off his jacket, puts the mail down, etc. Then he checks in on his device which is spinning slowly in the foreground. Time-lapse transiton.

Clearly the device needs an emblematic sound of some kind (maybe it has a technical relationship to the printing press sound but magical instead mundane). This emblematic sound could then develop over its various appearances where the printing press would remain static. What does the device sound like? Is it softly whirling and a little "tinkly" or more industrial than that? What are you thinking of for the time-lapse transition? I could carry over the device sound into the transition and morph it into the printing press sound (or layer in the printing press sound).

Next day. Ben at his printing press. Audio for this printing press section could be half sound design, half foley. I like the idea of a radio playing in the background, some conspiracy stuff like Art Bell (artbell.com) but all distorted, like it's being tuned, along with sounds of the press turning.

Does your audio suggestion here imply that the function of the printing press is developmental? If not, then it might be possible to maintain the mundane mechanistic character of the press but change the atmosphere around it---perhaps generated by processing the radio sound. This would give the radio sound a sense of being an actor in changing Ben's worldview by slowly becoming more surreal (all the while the printing press is chugging away in its mundanity).

Ben comes home. Goes through his ritual. Checks on his device again. Still spinning. Time-lapse.

Next day: Ben at his printing press again. Comes home. Goes through his ritual. Looks at his device. Still spinning. This time he notices a grainy texture. Puts it under the microcscope. The grains look like five-pointed stars. Part crystalline and part organic. Time lapse. But time, the audio should be slightly different with some beepy bird time noises. Is it birds or is it some kind of weird satellite?

The material should probably have some emblematic sound (perhaps an extension of part of the device sound). The time-lapse could then be an opportunity to morph this sound (particularly if it's the tinkly characteristic of the device) into the bird/satellite sound. [There's a scene from Solaris that I should show you sometime. Whenever something weird happens at the space station, there this tinkly bell-like sound. I'm thinking of that as the sound element from the device that becomes the sound element for the matter]

Next day. Ben at his press again. Comes home. But this time his ritual is interrupted. The device stopped. Ben examines it. Tries to fix it. But it doesn't work. Then Ben remembers his video camera. He looks at the video of his spinner for the past few hours and makes out something hazy. But he can't tell whether it's anything or just a shadow or a smudge. hmmmm.

Does the video footage have audio? If so, we could take the room and device sound make it mono and carve out the bottom end so it sounds sort of lo-fi. Also, the shadow could come across sonically as a "shadow" on the audio---a brief suppression of the high-end followed by a sudden silence (or does the device "spin down"?).

****
By now, Ben's kind of forgotten about his device. He could never get it to work again. So now we come to a sequence of images showing his life. He gets married and maybe has a baby. Everyday, home and vacation type photos. The photos are attached to a kind of rotating device that spins them slowly.
***

I gather the rotating device is not meant to be a real device, so probably no sound for it. Or perhaps an ambient sound with occasional hints of the special material sound or the bird satellite sound. This would normally be the moment for a music-video segment---it might be interesting to work explicitly against that.

Now Ben's back at work again. This time, the audio should sound as 'realistic' as possible. As he prints, ben notices something on the newsletter he's printing. Something looks like his spinning device is in the background. Dissolve to a church (a paper model) which has the spinner displayed on it somehow (not sure how this will work).

In a visual that's a metaphor for Ben searching through the church, Ben opens up the paper church and within, we see photos describing his search. Somehow his search takes him to...


I'm not sure I understand the church. Is it an actual church? Or is a metaphor of some kind? This might be a time to bring in a new, more musical element that could be part of an arc or expanding sounds through the rest of the video. One traditional thing to do would be bring in something serene and vocal-like (I think I can do this without being cheesy). However, I think I need to understand the church's function better.

***

The library. Ben's reading. Instead of cutaways as shown, probably the images will be projected onto Ben's face. Arcane, scary and medievalimages. Some of them look like the spinner. Then the bird-beeping noise. Then he hears a thud. Looks up. Probably nothing. Then a huge, almost machine gun like sound event like dozens and dozens of thuds. He looks at the window. It's cracked in a million places. Then we see a bloodied bird. Apparently a huge flock of birds flew into the window. Weird and scary.

Oooh, fun audio possibilities here! Apart from the clear sound design ideas, I think that dense and perhaps processed text would be great to accompany the images projected onto Ben's face.

***

Now, an abstract dance. Ben is in limbo now. He doesn't know what to believe. Is he being chased by someone or something? Is it his imagination? He's not sure what to do. Maybe this scene is a puppet or maybe it's ben. This audio could be custom-controlled electronic instrument.

***

This would be an interesting place to do a interactive instrument as you describe (that audio generated by the performance could potentially be augmented in post-production. We'd need to talk a bunch about this to figure out just what sensors would be needed, etc. Maybe this is the place where the dance/performance triggers off meaningful sound (the new material emblem, the spinning sound, the satellite sound, etc.)---the performance then would be a kind of visualization/sonification of the thought process that leads to the discovery of the conspiracy. I sort of like the idea of Ben doing it rather than a puppet or something more abstract. In a commercial tv/movie this would be another music video scene with some mournful music playing and Ben moodily walking the streets and thinking (or driving and thinking). The idea of a person actual physicalizing the thought process (in some way other than moodily walking) and having those physical gestures create the sound is really appealing to me. There are other examples of a character going through great anguish where the music provides the continuity (I'm thinking of the scene at the beginning of Apocalypse Now when Martin Sheen's character goes nuts and punches the mirror). If the dance here is to be one of anguish then the triggered audio would sort of work against that stereotype as well.


New scene. Back at the house where he's assembled all the papers. Now we read the conspiracy theory he's put together. Newton, Matter. Blah blah. Then the beeping noise. But this time it's synchronized with the image of a satellite. We zoom into Ben's room and then into the electric outlet. Short circuit. Fire! Everything's destoyed.

***

The traditional movie thing here would have building, dramatic music leading to the reveal. I think the reveal needs some sonic setup. Perhaps a building collage of the spinning noise, the new material emblem sound, the printing press, the church sound, the library text voices, etc. and then a dramatic cut back in sound at the reveal that let's the satellite sound be heard. (perhaps that collage has its origins in the "dance"). Do you plan a big reveal? or will it be understated?

This seems like the climax of the video---the discovery of the conspiracy followed by burning down. Is the big reveal the creation of matter? or is it the Newton as diversion angle? or? I think the audience needs to be set up early so that what is revealed has obvious import. Maybe one place to emphasize this would be the point at which he discovers the new matter in the microscope----at that point a flashback (or whatever device you think would be appropriate) would show again some of the material that he was reading at the beginning and the import of the violation of this law of physics. My only worry is that the creation of matter may not seem like that big a deal to most people unless it's stated upfront as the cornerstone of modern scientific thought. You talked about using conspiracy radio at one point---perhaps at the beginning of the video he's listening to the equivalent of NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday. The transition then from science radio to crackpot radio offers another way into understanding the changes in thought process that he's going through.


What happened to Ben? DId he die? Did the fire (and all the peculiar and frigtening events) -really- have something to do with the satellite? Were these all just concidences? New scene. We push in through window to see Ben. He's typing up his newsletter about what he learned about Newton.and the global conspiracy. Then he thinks. Kind of a blank look. A bit of fear overcomes him. He rewrites what he's typing into something blander and less specific then uploads, one star among millions.

Will there be some sort of surreal transition between these scenes? It would be an interesting place to rehash in a diffuse and reverse way (getting less dense) the collage that leads to the reveal.

Maybe instead of blander and less specific, maybe he changes the writing to be more crackpot conspiratorial in tone. There's a sort of version of this in the movie Men in Black (did you see that?) where the veteran agent picks up a bunch of tabloid papers to figure out what's actually going on declaring something like "the best news reporting on the planet." Not that I'm suggesting you emulate it, but it did remind me of that idea.

Accompanying the the blank look (perhaps triggering the frightened look) could be a "mental" version of the satellite sound---I know, how about lot's of reverb to show it as part of his thoughts... ; ) The moment of upload might be an interesting point to bring back the new material emblem and maybe the spinning device sound.

Anyway, I hope these thoughts weren't too incoherent. So looking over my own notes I seem to be suggesting an approach whereby sound emblems with specific import are introduced, brought back, and build up into a kind of semantic collage that mirrors the collage/assemblage that Ben constructs to reveal the conspiracy. I like this idea that there's a kind of run of the mill foley, etc. sound track intermingled with sounds and sound collages that carrying some of the meaning of the story (this is not exactly revolutionary, but I think it could be pretty effective).

I think this is going to be a really great project! Not to get ahead of myself, but do you have any particular timeline in mind for the various phases of the project.

I hope this is interesting and/or useful!

Talk to you soon.

--Dan