For Task 4 and 5 combined I am using the main battle scene from the film “Chronicles of Narnia”, as I feel that this leaves me a lot of room to take a variety of different approaches to my work.  In the film itself, a large part of the scene doesn’t contain any music, only sound effects, and although this works well I thought it would be interesting to see if I could add music (as well as creating sound effects of my own).  I was doubtful as to what the result would be, as with the amount of sound effects needed it would be easy to overcrowd the piece.

However, so far I believe that I have made a fairly successful attempt at creating my own take on this scene, and I will post my work so far on the blog shortly.

I have split my work into a number of different sections:

1:  The music – Although I decided to take a minimalist approach to the score, to avoid overcrowding, I have still maintained the idea of having used a full orchestra.  I did this by researching orchestration, using Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Theory of Harmony’ and ‘Structural Functions of Harmony’, and applying this to the orchestration of my composition.  So far everything is MIDI, however I plan to record some live instruments, particularly clarinet, flute, and trumpet to give it a more realistic feel.

2: Sound effects – As, there are so many sound effects required, I have split this into a number of subsections.

a)      Animals – there are a large number of animals (both real and fantasy) in the scene, so I spent a lot of time creating individual sounds for each creature before implementing them into the score.  I am finding it a challenge to create sounds for the ‘fantasy’ creatures (such as minotaurs, trolls, giants etc), as I have no grounding on which to base my work. Therefore I am currently using a process of trial and error – mixing other animal sounds with vocals and a few organic sounds – until I find sounds which I believe represent these creatures.

b)      Weapons – to create sounds for the weapons I am using a mixture of pre-recorded samples of metallic objects, such as pots, pans, keys etc, and adding effects to create the sounds of the multitude of weaponry found in the scene.

c)      Fire and ice – There is a small part of the scene where the ground is set on fire, followed quickly by the White Witch turning it to ice.

I still have a lot more to do on this task, however I will post my work so far shortly.