I came across this fantastic footage (Eames Power of Ten) recently & it reminded me of a few years back, ripping the DVD, and then working out how to get visually in & out of their footage by (a) shooting an impossible zoom on a beach not far from here… and (b) bribing a 3d geek to render me some bits of outer space (not as astro physicists might predict it but as me (& the Eames) might prefer it) all just in time for me to do an all-nighter & render my own audio before a gig in Auckland…. and it worked! Well I thought so anyway.. but it basically just reminded me how great the original footage was:
But so, recent news brought back another re-scoring flashback…. About this time last year, minus a year or two, the NZ Film Festival announced they were screening one of my favourite black & white silent films Metropolis but sadly with a ‘classical’ score that someone (?) had written decades afterwards….
I have, for the longest time, thought that THIS vision of the future from a 1920s perspective was pretty close to my idealist future; black & white, mechanistic etc….. and so more than a few times I had watched Metropolis via video projector, with a bunch of vinyl cued up, jamming one tune into the next, mixing it as I felt it…
Anyway, once I had worked out what version they were screening I decided to mix my own version of the soundtrack I craved to hear & thereafter put an mp3 on to my (then first gen) ipod and booked to go enjoy the lovely 35mm restored print with my own personal soundtrack…. A few days/drinks later a couple of my friends booked tickets in seats beside me, on the proviso that I provide a connection for their headphones to plug in to & such as it was, the 3 of us watched/heard a different movie to everyone else in the theatre…. which although I enjoyed it in an immediate way, also ingrained in me the significance of the situation: media is created for interpretation….. It simply sounded contemporary, but dont under-estimate the significance: re-dubbing a 320×240 pixelated piece of crap youtube video is quite different to hearing a NEW full bandwidth soundtrack to a film (35mm celluloid) projected, such as we 3 did…. believe you me…. and if that is your true vocation (scoring images) then your time is never wasted, scoring footage of times past… even if no one sees/hears it (3 people really isnt that far from one or zero) – for what you learn from the process is immesurable…. and I strongly supect I am the only owner of a DVD of Metropolis, with an accompanying tightly synced drum&bass/ambient soundtrack, that makes perfect narrative sense to me…… and really, what else matters?
It’s possible to watch your version of metropolis?
i’d be breaking serious copyright on about a dozen peoples work to even try & make it available… i think that means i cant see how i can make it available….
Metropolis is not listed in the public domain movies here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_domain_films
although some seriously great old movies are…..
hmmmm…
Funnily enough I have a movie poster from Metroplis on the wall of my studio, along with a bunch of posters from films that I’ve worked on & more than a few times people have asked: “Did you work on all these films?”
Well not THAT one, I was about minus 38 years old when it was released!
Ok. =)
Thanks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pe44fQg0sE
This is a sequence of the movie Babel (Alejandro González Inárritu) but the music was changed with Theory of machine by Ben Frost (http://www.ethermachines.com/).
I did this work because for me the orginal music don’t work with the story and the screenplay.
[...] The Music of Sound recently posted this video as well, but I think you really can’t watch this enough. I honestly don’t remember the first time I saw this (most likely during a science class in high school) but the most influential viewing I had of it was probably about 15 years ago or so, at an exhibit in Chicago. I’m a total sucker for cyclical, end-where-you-started structures, and when I was working on my first major sound piece, Lave (for a release on Crouton), it was Powers of 10 more than anything else which influenced the way I composed it. [...]