Two more (related) fanfic bunnies:
2013 Lara Croft looks for Atlantis instead of Yamatai. This is not the story you'd think at first glance. The 2013 reboot is somewhat more realistic but certainly more gritty than the original (or Anniversary remake) story. More so, the character and arc presented in the 2013 reboot is far from the person Natla would have hired.
So take it that one step further. The thing I've loved about the reboot Lara -- as much as the actual games largely fail to deliver -- is that she is an actual academic. She's a professionally trained archaeologist, not a treasure hunter. Plus of course she has (as she discovers in the game) remarkable depths of endurance and determination.
So change the entire Atlantis setup until it becomes something that a college student could reasonably be sucked into. Discover it not as a great adventure by a skilled adventuress, but as a completely unexpected and world-changing discovery made during an ordinary excavation.
2013 Croft (yes, that's the theme of this pair of bunnies. Sorry.) discovers the Stargate. Sorta. You have to change the Stargate universe significantly, not just to make it a story the, again, college student just starting out and unsure of her strengths Lara would fall into, but because having the whole Stargate Command thing already happening is to me not as interesting a story. So it's a rewrite there, too. The Stargate is still buried in Giza.
Or is in a warehouse outside of DC, because once you've changed one canon that far, why not change the other...that Lara's dad played the Ernest Littlefield role, the circumstances of his disappearance were covered up by the government, and, yeah, Ra is still out there.
Sigh. That's one of the downsides of learning to write. You start seeing story elements as little gears and pulleys you can re-arrange. And some pieces are like that block in the Tetris world; just so easy to fit into anything you want to keep reaching for it -- even as everyone else has already done the same. That's how well-used furniture and worn-out tropes and stock characters keep coming back and back. It is too easy to think in mechanics, not in the complexities of life. Too easy to go "Say, why don't I just add a spoiled princess here; she could tell them about the magic sword then...."
Associated with that is the urge to tinker. To take a work that someone else has produced and try to fix it. Or just shake it up and see what happens differently. What if Paris had taken Athena's bribe instead? (I bet it still would have worked out badly for Troy). What if the Ten Thousand hadn't stood down when they got word that Cyrus was dead (still probably in a world of hurt after the heirs of Artaxerxes got their shit together.
From such exercises comes alternate histories, sequels...and fanfic.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Invasion of the Cloak Pins
I almost wrote myself into a corner. After a week of despair I was finally able to back off from the impossible task of three full-length books each delving deeply into a different culture of the Late Bronze Age.
The back stories of the characters are going to have to remain largely back-story. But there are some good ideas left from that too-ambitious scheme.
I'm going to start in Akhetaton, with an official scavenging expedition into the ruins of the old city of the heretic Pharaoh. Opening that is with a distant lens on the Egyptian culture and with distant drums (the Amarna Letters have some very interesting mentions of a few of the so-called "Sea Peoples.")
I'll add on characters with small introductory/back story scenes for each until we have the full cast. And my thought was that instead of starting with Wilusa, as the first of the dominos to fall, this particular version of the Trojan War is the climax -- with our cast press-ganged along by the warlords who moved into the power vacuum in Greece following the burning of the palaces, as part of the "Sea Peoples" sweep of invasions.
And it turns out that isn't particularly out of the mainstream of archaeological thinking. The nature and extent of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are as much debated as the possible causes. We may some day look back at the idea of the Sea Peoples (who were never grouped and named as such in period sources) as as much of a relic as the idea of the Dorian Invasions.
That there were raids from the sea is not in question. Nor that there were mass migrations of people. What is in question is who any of them were; for every strong identification we manage to make on one line of evidence, there is counter-evidence. The LBA Collapse is, as has been noted, frequently interpreted to the tenor of the times. In the 1970s it was all about environmental collapse. Now the hot idea is climate change. In the pre-war years it was invasion by outsiders, some claiming the Sea Peoples swept down through Italy or even from as far as the Carpathian Mountains.
In the Cold War years invasion was closer to home; waves of raiders from Greece or from Anatolia, as if entire nations had suddenly decided to go a-Viking.
The thinking these days seems to be something like a perfect storm; earthquake, drought, famine, the complacence of too long between wars, leading to a generalized eruption of violence, piracy, mass migration, cascading displacement, and revolution against the stagnant palace economies. But there is no consensus. There is so little consensus, you can't even call the more outré theories outliers.
Like the Luwian hypothesis. This takes many forms, with the most extreme (and though-provoking) being that Troy and a big chunk of the Western coast is one powerful state, the Luwians, who drive out and all but destroy the neighboring Hittite Empire. Until a coalition of the powerful kings of the various Mycenaean Greeks form to take the battle to them.
Which would be what Homer wrote of. But I think the Luwians are selling themselves short. A powerful evil empire ruling most of the world until proud Athens stands up against them? I think we're talking Plato.
Ah, that's the fun of writing in this period. Of course, any day now could see the uncovering of something that will clarify the whole picture. Or, more likely, cause us to throw away what little we think we're sure of. And I have no guesses as to what is going to be discovered, but if you ask me where, the place that would surprise me least is the ongoing archaeological investigations at Byblos.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Don't know much about...
I am totally the wrong person to attempt a historical novel. Not because I'm so weak at history. Because I'm so crazy about getting things right. Even when "getting it right" wasn't in the requirements in the first place.
My (almost-finished) Tomb Raider/Stargate cross-over had some big escape clauses. First, it's Tomb Raider (actually, Stargate is even worse.) Canonically, Atlantis was a real place. Writing a Tomb Raider story that is honest to the existing canon is by definition writing wrong history. (It's subtler than that; especially with Stargate's implicit aliens-built-the-pyramids foundation, all of history and the process of history have to be warped to work within the framework of that universe).
Second, it was a fanfic. At any point I could declare that getting something right was just too much work. And if I made an error, I wasn't going back to fix it.
This novel is looking to be mainstream historical fiction. That's bad.
My (almost-finished) Tomb Raider/Stargate cross-over had some big escape clauses. First, it's Tomb Raider (actually, Stargate is even worse.) Canonically, Atlantis was a real place. Writing a Tomb Raider story that is honest to the existing canon is by definition writing wrong history. (It's subtler than that; especially with Stargate's implicit aliens-built-the-pyramids foundation, all of history and the process of history have to be warped to work within the framework of that universe).
Second, it was a fanfic. At any point I could declare that getting something right was just too much work. And if I made an error, I wasn't going back to fix it.
This novel is looking to be mainstream historical fiction. That's bad.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Cold
Been reading a little fiction lately. The level of look and feel I like in a book seems rare. A military SF story didn't have it. A YA fantasy did.
I also played a little Skyrim, with several popular fan-made mods that make the cold and rain (and hunger and disease) a bigger threat than the wolves. And that reminded me that for some details of traveling, working, camping out in the wilds, I don't have to draw from secondary sources. I'm in no risk there of copying what another writer said about how it feels to labor in the cold rain to build a shelter, or to stare into the night waiting on an attack so long, and on so little sleep, the hallucinations begin. I can draw from experience.
There's got to be some advantage to having a few decades of life experience behind me. And it hasn't all been sitting at a computer. (I still wish I had a deeper grasp of the Classics, but even history -- at least at the depth I'm currently grappling with it -- is relatively new to me).
There was -- perhaps still is -- a chance to take a mere gloss of the Bronze Age and write (relatively) generic adventure on top of it. But research has a way of taking over. I just picked up a book on the history of weaving, and have an eye on an excellent book on women's experience in the Bronze Age that, unfortunately for me, comes in at a staggering $170 for hardcopy.
It is basically a fluke of Linear B; how words are constructed in it and how it was employed in the palatial societies, but one of the tiny windows into the lives of ordinary people in the Bronze Age looks upon the lives of women weavers attached to the palace.
And, yes, a similar window, a similar fluke of documentation looks into the community of artisans working in the Valley of Kings. (There's also an unusual bit of paperwork addressing the duties at a Hittite frontier guard post). And, yes, other people have pursued enquiries through these windows, which is why there's some pretty good resources on Mycenae weavers.
All of which is a long way of saying I am increasingly attracted towards writing more towards the mainstream of historical fiction. About people's lives, about their worlds. Less about military exploits with minimal context.
With these kinds of resources -- and with the situation of the Late Bronze Age -- I could elaborate the story of any single character into a novel's width. Their backstories are, currently, more interesting to me than the team-up, and I want to tell them. Even if I end up with three books before the Avengers Assemble.
At the moment, though, one of the few other elements that is coming to clarity is how I want to use magic. To borrow a term from the paper-and-pencil RPG Runequest, no "battle magic." All the cultures I've studied so far have magic that is trivially easy to use -- amulets, cantrips, potions, sacrifices -- but their effects are trivial. Or, at least, subtle. The big stuff, the live-changing prophesies or the resurrection spells or the typhoons and earthquakes take a while to set up. And often as not involve the gods.
There's little cultural equivalent of someone casually flying or throwing a bolt of fire or any of the other easily-accessed, extremely-effective magic of anyone from a Dungeons & Dragons magic-user to the Wicked Witch of the West.
I'm not ruling out the big magic, note. Although I really, really don't want to involve gods.
I also played a little Skyrim, with several popular fan-made mods that make the cold and rain (and hunger and disease) a bigger threat than the wolves. And that reminded me that for some details of traveling, working, camping out in the wilds, I don't have to draw from secondary sources. I'm in no risk there of copying what another writer said about how it feels to labor in the cold rain to build a shelter, or to stare into the night waiting on an attack so long, and on so little sleep, the hallucinations begin. I can draw from experience.
There's got to be some advantage to having a few decades of life experience behind me. And it hasn't all been sitting at a computer. (I still wish I had a deeper grasp of the Classics, but even history -- at least at the depth I'm currently grappling with it -- is relatively new to me).
There was -- perhaps still is -- a chance to take a mere gloss of the Bronze Age and write (relatively) generic adventure on top of it. But research has a way of taking over. I just picked up a book on the history of weaving, and have an eye on an excellent book on women's experience in the Bronze Age that, unfortunately for me, comes in at a staggering $170 for hardcopy.
It is basically a fluke of Linear B; how words are constructed in it and how it was employed in the palatial societies, but one of the tiny windows into the lives of ordinary people in the Bronze Age looks upon the lives of women weavers attached to the palace.
And, yes, a similar window, a similar fluke of documentation looks into the community of artisans working in the Valley of Kings. (There's also an unusual bit of paperwork addressing the duties at a Hittite frontier guard post). And, yes, other people have pursued enquiries through these windows, which is why there's some pretty good resources on Mycenae weavers.
All of which is a long way of saying I am increasingly attracted towards writing more towards the mainstream of historical fiction. About people's lives, about their worlds. Less about military exploits with minimal context.
With these kinds of resources -- and with the situation of the Late Bronze Age -- I could elaborate the story of any single character into a novel's width. Their backstories are, currently, more interesting to me than the team-up, and I want to tell them. Even if I end up with three books before the Avengers Assemble.
At the moment, though, one of the few other elements that is coming to clarity is how I want to use magic. To borrow a term from the paper-and-pencil RPG Runequest, no "battle magic." All the cultures I've studied so far have magic that is trivially easy to use -- amulets, cantrips, potions, sacrifices -- but their effects are trivial. Or, at least, subtle. The big stuff, the live-changing prophesies or the resurrection spells or the typhoons and earthquakes take a while to set up. And often as not involve the gods.
There's little cultural equivalent of someone casually flying or throwing a bolt of fire or any of the other easily-accessed, extremely-effective magic of anyone from a Dungeons & Dragons magic-user to the Wicked Witch of the West.
I'm not ruling out the big magic, note. Although I really, really don't want to involve gods.
Saturday, January 20, 2018
I am your density
Two things that surprised me about the Khajiit piece was how well the instruments worked together, and how few parts I actually needed. The first shouldn't be that great a surprise. Musical instruments have been under evolutionary pressure for centuries to get along with each other. They represent a very narrow band of all possible sounds, being sounds that are generally harmonious, of a compressed dynamic range, and generally close to the tonal range of the human voice.
The small number of parts should also not have been surprising. I had a pretty big clue from my experience with Agamemnon. When I had composed for virtual instruments (aka "MIDI") it required a fair number of parts -- of instrumental lines -- to fill up the sonic space. I wrote more sparingly for Agamemnon; what filled up the sonic space there was the stacks of noise and distortion effects.
Which physical instruments have. I forget the writer who, speaking of the difference between synthesized and "real" instruments, used the phrase "sweat and spit." The sound of a physical instrument is nuanced and ever-changing; even as not all those nuances are intentional by the performer. You hear noise. The bow squeaks, the fingers slide along strings and slap down frets and clatter on valves.
Even the massed forces of the symphony orchestra show their humanity in bits of what the creators of Garritan Personal Orchestra (a lovely collection of virtual symphonic instruments) refer to as "scoring noise." Chair move, papers rustle, people breathe. All of this added complexity adds to the interest and sonic density of the instrumental line (as well as adding to the humanity; of that special thrill of witnessing a human carrying off a difficult task.)
I grew up around keyboards. Now, I'm not going to claim all pianos sound alike, all keys sound alike, all ways of striking them sound alike. But the big thing is that piano keys are largely uncoupled from the physical actions that produce the sound. The individual notes are more alike than not. So the keyboardist works for harmonic and rhythmic complexity, for polyphonic lines, for cascades and glissandos and arpeggios; in short, for multiplicity.
A monophonic instrument like violin or trumpet (ignore double stops and multiphonics for this point) puts all the performer's nuance into a -- for lack of a better word -- vocal approach to the single melodic line. The variety of attacks, the evolutions of tone color, the options to slur or detaché or slide, are all applied to articulate the part in a way not dissimilar to how a singer forms words.
I knew all this in theory but it surprised me that it was sonically satisfying with just a recorder and a bodhran in the space. Some of this is range; the bodhran appears more limited than a rock drum kit but it still fills out many of the same frequency bands. You've got your bass hits, your tom fills, and scratching and brushing not unlike the brush and/or sizzle of a snare. Where it really lacks is in the high tones that in a kit are filled with the white-noise wash of cymbals and hat. But a recorder fits that niche nicely.
Two recorders -- soprano and alto -- fill up not just the higher tones but the vocal range. Add the wash of reverb coming back in glistening highs and a little friendly low-end mud to glue things together, and it is enough.
And that's something I really want to think about more. About how the proper selection of a relatively small number of instruments can fill up the sonic plate as effectively as the massed forces of a (synthesized) symphony orchestra.
So what next?
Obviously I need to work on my chops. Since I've gone 180' from the idea of hiding my performance deficiencies behind layers of synthesized symphonic cover to actually planning multiple exposed solo lines, I really need to become a better player than I am.
At this stage, though, performance is the best tutor. I learned so much trying to play to metronome, playing along with previously recorded tracks. And so much about where I could cover and fake and where I needed to be able to do better.
A few random ideas have appeared. The "Bardic Cover" is amusing and I know how to work those particular instruments. Not saying I'm not wishing for a tenor recorder and a guitar-like instrument with deeper tones available than the ukulele offers. (Perhaps even a baroque-lele -- they look really cool, but reviews are mixed).
It occurred to me that "NYC," of all things -- the pean to New York from the musical Annie -- might fit that instrumentation. At least it would an excuse to really try for the recorder polyphony I bowed out of on the last piece. Even filk up the lyrics..."Sol-i-tude...there's something about you..."
I'll hold on to that thought and see if the video I posted on YouTube gets any hits.
A while back the thought occurred to try to cover the original series Battlestar Galactica theme in the style of Chuck Mangione. Don't ask me why.
I found sheet music recently for the lyrical "Fire Treasure" from the long-running Lupin series of manga, anime, and movies. I bet a flugelhorn could handle the melodic line. I'd be a little surprised if my hundred-dollar trumpet could.
And close to the top of my chart at the moment, a salsa take on "Still Alive" from the game Portal. Which is trumpet, bass, keyboard, and the only part I'm sure I have the performance chops for is clave. But if I could carry it off...well, there's real temptation for another video...
The small number of parts should also not have been surprising. I had a pretty big clue from my experience with Agamemnon. When I had composed for virtual instruments (aka "MIDI") it required a fair number of parts -- of instrumental lines -- to fill up the sonic space. I wrote more sparingly for Agamemnon; what filled up the sonic space there was the stacks of noise and distortion effects.
Which physical instruments have. I forget the writer who, speaking of the difference between synthesized and "real" instruments, used the phrase "sweat and spit." The sound of a physical instrument is nuanced and ever-changing; even as not all those nuances are intentional by the performer. You hear noise. The bow squeaks, the fingers slide along strings and slap down frets and clatter on valves.
Even the massed forces of the symphony orchestra show their humanity in bits of what the creators of Garritan Personal Orchestra (a lovely collection of virtual symphonic instruments) refer to as "scoring noise." Chair move, papers rustle, people breathe. All of this added complexity adds to the interest and sonic density of the instrumental line (as well as adding to the humanity; of that special thrill of witnessing a human carrying off a difficult task.)
I grew up around keyboards. Now, I'm not going to claim all pianos sound alike, all keys sound alike, all ways of striking them sound alike. But the big thing is that piano keys are largely uncoupled from the physical actions that produce the sound. The individual notes are more alike than not. So the keyboardist works for harmonic and rhythmic complexity, for polyphonic lines, for cascades and glissandos and arpeggios; in short, for multiplicity.
A monophonic instrument like violin or trumpet (ignore double stops and multiphonics for this point) puts all the performer's nuance into a -- for lack of a better word -- vocal approach to the single melodic line. The variety of attacks, the evolutions of tone color, the options to slur or detaché or slide, are all applied to articulate the part in a way not dissimilar to how a singer forms words.
I knew all this in theory but it surprised me that it was sonically satisfying with just a recorder and a bodhran in the space. Some of this is range; the bodhran appears more limited than a rock drum kit but it still fills out many of the same frequency bands. You've got your bass hits, your tom fills, and scratching and brushing not unlike the brush and/or sizzle of a snare. Where it really lacks is in the high tones that in a kit are filled with the white-noise wash of cymbals and hat. But a recorder fits that niche nicely.
Two recorders -- soprano and alto -- fill up not just the higher tones but the vocal range. Add the wash of reverb coming back in glistening highs and a little friendly low-end mud to glue things together, and it is enough.
And that's something I really want to think about more. About how the proper selection of a relatively small number of instruments can fill up the sonic plate as effectively as the massed forces of a (synthesized) symphony orchestra.
So what next?
Obviously I need to work on my chops. Since I've gone 180' from the idea of hiding my performance deficiencies behind layers of synthesized symphonic cover to actually planning multiple exposed solo lines, I really need to become a better player than I am.
At this stage, though, performance is the best tutor. I learned so much trying to play to metronome, playing along with previously recorded tracks. And so much about where I could cover and fake and where I needed to be able to do better.
A few random ideas have appeared. The "Bardic Cover" is amusing and I know how to work those particular instruments. Not saying I'm not wishing for a tenor recorder and a guitar-like instrument with deeper tones available than the ukulele offers. (Perhaps even a baroque-lele -- they look really cool, but reviews are mixed).
It occurred to me that "NYC," of all things -- the pean to New York from the musical Annie -- might fit that instrumentation. At least it would an excuse to really try for the recorder polyphony I bowed out of on the last piece. Even filk up the lyrics..."Sol-i-tude...there's something about you..."
I'll hold on to that thought and see if the video I posted on YouTube gets any hits.
A while back the thought occurred to try to cover the original series Battlestar Galactica theme in the style of Chuck Mangione. Don't ask me why.
I found sheet music recently for the lyrical "Fire Treasure" from the long-running Lupin series of manga, anime, and movies. I bet a flugelhorn could handle the melodic line. I'd be a little surprised if my hundred-dollar trumpet could.
And close to the top of my chart at the moment, a salsa take on "Still Alive" from the game Portal. Which is trumpet, bass, keyboard, and the only part I'm sure I have the performance chops for is clave. But if I could carry it off...well, there's real temptation for another video...
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Color Grading
It's not that odd that I've never done a serious video before.
Sure...I've flirted with it. There was for instance an animation I did in Bryce 3D a while back. Hand-painted lightning effects and all. But a slow computer and a seriously small budget made serious video work too frustrating to face.
Now the thing I'm shortest of is time. It's sad, really. I have so many of the skills: I've studied basic shot and structure (whilst trying to learn comic book art...another long story). Did lighting design (for theater) professionally. Recorded voice talent including using a boom pole to do it. Built and rigged 3d models. But I don't have the patience to get into something too terribly elaborate.
I just wanted to finish the joke. As long as I was going to record a "bardic" (Early Instrument) cover of a Skyrim fan song about the memetic Khajiit fondness for shadows, I wanted to do a video that included screen capture of in-game performance of the instruments I was more-or-less simulating in the music I recorded.
And, okay: here's the final product:
After the first attempt, I decided I needed more clarity and more of an arc. The big trick in pulling things together more was to use Breezehome (an in-game purchasable dwelling in Skyrim) as the background to all the live tracks. The other was to use some long in-game sequences in full screen under the other elements, roughly dividing the video into four phases (Riften fly-in and reveal, Breezehome, the road to Riverwood, and outside the shrine in Whiterun).
I walked around Breezehome for a while, freezing in place to take 10-20 seconds of background plate wherever I found an interesting shot. Of course, it was late in the process when I realized many of my recording sessions were seated and a crouched posture would be a better perspective.
Then to live shooting. I didn't have the patience to set up lights or to really play with costumes (I also don't own any...if I do another bardic cover I should really pick up a shirt, though.) Pretty much, I popped open the 5' x 7' chroma-key screen, leaned it against the book-case, lined myself up more-or-less in front of it in my work clothes and faked my way through the parts.
I'd also done a lot of takes and a lot of chopping and adjusting when I recorded, so i would have been too much work to replicate the actual performances for the video. I mimed most of the woodwind parts when taping video. I did use a metronome to try to be somewhat on time, but when I got into the editor the lag was so bad it was too frustrating to try to line up the takes exactly.
That, and there were often artistic reasons to move the take. I slowed a few of them down, duplicated several, even mirror-imaged a couple all to fit the video better.
To take the load on the poor video editor down a little I made a comp of all the live parts and my game-recorded backgrounds. Each track had a good dozen filters on it; besides the chroma-key I had to scale and shift the background elements appropriately, brighten them up a little, and do a bunch of color and contrast adjustment to the live video to try to make it look like it belonged in the same world as the new background.
Then splice those parts into the video. With unfortunately even more tweaking of crop and scale and brightness and so forth. I didn't try to get all the instruments in there -- there are places where I tracked two shawms, four crumhorns, two recorders, ukulele, and bodhran all at the same time -- but I still ended up with almost twenty tracks of video. No wonder poor ShotCut was running slow!
Oh, yes. And the ending of the video is entirely lucky chance. I had switched to animation camera using a console code and that makes the character nearly uncontrollable. My random attempts to walk to a new shot location caused Yakima the camera cat to hide behind Heimskar the Priest. I thought it was funny so I saved it.
Sure...I've flirted with it. There was for instance an animation I did in Bryce 3D a while back. Hand-painted lightning effects and all. But a slow computer and a seriously small budget made serious video work too frustrating to face.
Now the thing I'm shortest of is time. It's sad, really. I have so many of the skills: I've studied basic shot and structure (whilst trying to learn comic book art...another long story). Did lighting design (for theater) professionally. Recorded voice talent including using a boom pole to do it. Built and rigged 3d models. But I don't have the patience to get into something too terribly elaborate.
I just wanted to finish the joke. As long as I was going to record a "bardic" (Early Instrument) cover of a Skyrim fan song about the memetic Khajiit fondness for shadows, I wanted to do a video that included screen capture of in-game performance of the instruments I was more-or-less simulating in the music I recorded.
And, okay: here's the final product:
After the first attempt, I decided I needed more clarity and more of an arc. The big trick in pulling things together more was to use Breezehome (an in-game purchasable dwelling in Skyrim) as the background to all the live tracks. The other was to use some long in-game sequences in full screen under the other elements, roughly dividing the video into four phases (Riften fly-in and reveal, Breezehome, the road to Riverwood, and outside the shrine in Whiterun).
I walked around Breezehome for a while, freezing in place to take 10-20 seconds of background plate wherever I found an interesting shot. Of course, it was late in the process when I realized many of my recording sessions were seated and a crouched posture would be a better perspective.
Then to live shooting. I didn't have the patience to set up lights or to really play with costumes (I also don't own any...if I do another bardic cover I should really pick up a shirt, though.) Pretty much, I popped open the 5' x 7' chroma-key screen, leaned it against the book-case, lined myself up more-or-less in front of it in my work clothes and faked my way through the parts.
I'd also done a lot of takes and a lot of chopping and adjusting when I recorded, so i would have been too much work to replicate the actual performances for the video. I mimed most of the woodwind parts when taping video. I did use a metronome to try to be somewhat on time, but when I got into the editor the lag was so bad it was too frustrating to try to line up the takes exactly.
That, and there were often artistic reasons to move the take. I slowed a few of them down, duplicated several, even mirror-imaged a couple all to fit the video better.
To take the load on the poor video editor down a little I made a comp of all the live parts and my game-recorded backgrounds. Each track had a good dozen filters on it; besides the chroma-key I had to scale and shift the background elements appropriately, brighten them up a little, and do a bunch of color and contrast adjustment to the live video to try to make it look like it belonged in the same world as the new background.
Then splice those parts into the video. With unfortunately even more tweaking of crop and scale and brightness and so forth. I didn't try to get all the instruments in there -- there are places where I tracked two shawms, four crumhorns, two recorders, ukulele, and bodhran all at the same time -- but I still ended up with almost twenty tracks of video. No wonder poor ShotCut was running slow!
Oh, yes. And the ending of the video is entirely lucky chance. I had switched to animation camera using a console code and that makes the character nearly uncontrollable. My random attempts to walk to a new shot location caused Yakima the camera cat to hide behind Heimskar the Priest. I thought it was funny so I saved it.
Instrumentality
Way back when I was writing music using MIDI: what we call now "virtual instruments" or "software synthesis," but at the time was largely in physical devices, often rack-mount ROMplers (a samPLER using Read-Only Memory chips to store the waveform data).
And my thought was that I should really learn to play a few of the instruments I was simulating: so as to get an understanding of the language of that instrument, how it was normally played, what is idiomatic and what is difficult, and thus produce more realistic MIDI compositions.
Some years later I was mixing bands and pit orchestras and that thought came around again in slightly different clothes: I should learn to play an instrument (other than keyboard) so I could understand and gain sympathy for what the musicians I was working with are going through, and learn how to better support them.
Forward several more years, and what changed is that I now had funds. A steady day job -- which also meant my free time was presenting in a form that made possible daily practice sessions with the instruments I could now afford. I wasn't mixing shows any more, and my own (MIDI-ish) music had moved in different directions, so what was left was mostly that largely inchoate desire to actually try a brass instrument, or even a violin, and find out if I could actually play it.
In the back of my mind was a new thought; that I could continue to compose with virtual instruments, but I could "pad out" the tracks with live recordings (the same way I was already using found sounds and samples and other sonic raw material.)
After about eighteen months of learning on what has turned into a growing collection of musical instruments I started on the first composition that would be designed from the start around recorded parts. And what happened? On closer examination that particular piece had the peculiarity that I could -- technically -- perform every part on it. There would be no MIDI, no synthesis, no found sounds. All would be actual musical performance.
The most surprising part is that it doesn't sound that bad.
(The other funny hilarious thing is that almost none of my new collection of instruments figured into it. Mostly, it became possible because back in my budget days the instruments I could afford were recorders.)
And my thought was that I should really learn to play a few of the instruments I was simulating: so as to get an understanding of the language of that instrument, how it was normally played, what is idiomatic and what is difficult, and thus produce more realistic MIDI compositions.
Some years later I was mixing bands and pit orchestras and that thought came around again in slightly different clothes: I should learn to play an instrument (other than keyboard) so I could understand and gain sympathy for what the musicians I was working with are going through, and learn how to better support them.
Forward several more years, and what changed is that I now had funds. A steady day job -- which also meant my free time was presenting in a form that made possible daily practice sessions with the instruments I could now afford. I wasn't mixing shows any more, and my own (MIDI-ish) music had moved in different directions, so what was left was mostly that largely inchoate desire to actually try a brass instrument, or even a violin, and find out if I could actually play it.
In the back of my mind was a new thought; that I could continue to compose with virtual instruments, but I could "pad out" the tracks with live recordings (the same way I was already using found sounds and samples and other sonic raw material.)
After about eighteen months of learning on what has turned into a growing collection of musical instruments I started on the first composition that would be designed from the start around recorded parts. And what happened? On closer examination that particular piece had the peculiarity that I could -- technically -- perform every part on it. There would be no MIDI, no synthesis, no found sounds. All would be actual musical performance.
The most surprising part is that it doesn't sound that bad.
(The other funny hilarious thing is that almost none of my new collection of instruments figured into it. Mostly, it became possible because back in my budget days the instruments I could afford were recorders.)
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