PLANNING

For this project, we had to research and find a clip that had suitable dialogue and foley that could be recreated. These would have to be approved by our lecturer. I decided that I wanted to use an animated clip that would be within my skill set to reproduce. My reasoning for choosing an animated clip was that I feel there is more flexibility in the sounds that you can create/use. I looked at a couple of clips from a few movies and eventually I settled on a scene from the movie Coraline. I’ve always loved this movie from my childhood, and I have an appreciation for stop motion and the time and effort that goes into it. Once this was approved by my lecturer, I went and created a sound map which I broke into the categories of Foley, SFX, Dialogue, Ambience and Music and listed what sounds I would need at each timestamp. After I completed this, I created my ProTools session at 24 bit and 48kHz, which is the industry standard, before using colour coded markers and routing folders to help keep my session organised. The markers would also aid when recording as it would cue performers and the routing folders made it easier to bounce the audio as STEMS.

The clip I choose is from the end of the movie when we see the true form of the Other Mother (OM). It’s a very tense and scary scene where Coraline (C) gambles her own life to rescue her parents and the eyes of the Ghost Children. Keeping this in mind, I was very selective about sounds, ambiences, music and tonalities of these to complement the clip and build suspense.

As I knew that I wanted to create my own music for this clip, I decided to research the composer of the film Bruno Coulais. Coulais was able to provide a soundtrack that blended childlike wonder with a sense of foreboding as well as music that made you feel uneasy, but this complemented the spookier scenes. In an interview with The Joy of Movies, Coulais stated that some of the most prominent instruments featured in Coraline, along with a large orchestra, were the harp, strings, strange sounding instruments, ethnic instruments, synths and voices.  The original music in this scene features eerie pizzicato strings and syncopated bells and for my own composition I used strings as a drone throughout with some pizzicato flange harp playing in semitones to add some dissonance and create unease with the music.