Artists Influences and Musical Response
I will be recording and arranging sound design for a short film called ‘3WW’. The film is a music video for the band Alt J, I will be removing the music and working with the visuals only. I believe that this gives me an opportunity to take inspiration and influence from both the visual directors intentions and the musical/lyrical content.
‘There was a wayward lad
Stepped out one morning
The ground to be his bed
The sky his awningNeon, neon, neon
A blue neon lamp in a midnight country field
Can’t surround so you lean on, lean on
So much your heart’s become fond of this
Oh, these three worn words
Oh, let me whisper like the rubbing hands
Of tourists in Verona
I just want to love you in my own language
Well, that smell of sex
Good like burning wood
The wayward lad laid clean
To two busty girls from Hornsea
Who left a note in black ink
Girls from above say “Hi” (hi)
The road erodes at five feet per year
Around England’s east coastline
Was this your first time?
Love is just a button we press
Last night by the campfire
Oh, these three worn words
Oh, that we whisper like the rubbing hands
Of tourists in Verona
I just want to love you in my own language’
-Lyrics of ‘3WW’ By Alt J
Alt-J approached Alex Takacs (also known as Young Replicant) to direct a short film for their song 3WW, a song about love and loss, they also requested that Takacs take influence from a Ted Hughes book of Poems ‘Birthday Letters’. At first Takacs thought that the poems and the lyrics had little in common content-wise, but after spending some time with them both he recognised a shared sense of ‘dark sensuality and morbidity’.
Ted Hughes was a very celebrated English poet, in 1956 he married another celebrated poet by the name of Sylvia Plath. They had an infamously intense relationship, until she took her own life in 1963 when she was just 30 years old. In the years past this event, Sylvia became an object of investigation for poetry enthusiasts, and a very important figure for feminist literary theorists. Due to this, Ted Hughes often became a target of criticism in light of events surrounding Plath’s suicide, them being separated at the time and her still being devoted to him. For Hughes, this criticism was a strange experience, strangers prodding into an intense love, he equates it to a pack of dogs ravaging her grave and digging up her body. ‘Pulling her remains, with their lips lifted like dog’s lips into new positions.’
This poem is about a small pocket of something beautiful being attacked from all sides, and the person inside it trying to protect it, struggling against this barrage but ultimately realising it to be a sisyphean task.
In response, Takacs created a visual story of a tragic romance between two characters, Ramon and Julina (A reference to Shakespeare). The film follows the funeral procession for Julina after her untimely death, the coffin is then carried by Ramon alone through the mountains, wherein he builds campfires, experiences a lightning strike a tree very close to him and the coffin is attacked by a pack of wild dogs.
Although the brunt of this project will be foley work and atmos, I want to create some melodic elements in the sound design to respond to the poem and reflect the emotions that the poem/film invokes, I believe these to be isolation, determination, remorse and nostalgia. As a reference I’m looking at ‘Romantic Works’ by Keaton Henson, specifically ‘Petrichor’ as a palette. I feel that this will be a small part of the project, I would like to keep the music subtle, as a supplement to the sound design. Through providing a realistic audio environment I would like the listener to be immersed in the otherworldly scenes. I’m hoping that this immersion will make it easier to sneak in emotional musicality without it being the focus of the piece.