MUSIC + SOUND DESIGN FOR EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION: COPYCUT SCANFILL
I’m happy to unveil a project I’ve been working on for a while: an original musical score and sound design for “Copycut Scanfill”, an experimental animation by C.C. Stanhill.
In Stanhill’s imagery-- animated entirely on a defective photocopier-- familiar images begin to drift, morph and dance their way into uncanny new forms. In our discussion of where the score and sound should go, we agreed that formal concerns were dominant. There was no narrative to support, and we figured there shouldn’t be “development” throughout the piece per se, but that my approach as composer and sound designer should be to mirror both the quirkiness of the imagery and the modular, step by step presentation of each section.
Inspired by the basic principle of what a malfunctioning photocopier can do to a found image, I decided to start with what sounded like a “vintage” musical composition, and then (as I often do) use pieces of that base material as raw material for the rest of the score and sound design. Using virtual instruments, I created a jazz-blues instrumental (aiming for something like the music of Memphis Slim), futzed it to sound like an old crackly vinyl record, and set about taking it apart and putting it back together again.
As ever, the process was something like shattering a stained glass window and reassembling the pieces in some new configuration. OK, maybe after melting and re-shaping some of the shards first: I bent, warped, twisted, folded, dissolved, and molded the samples of each instrument using a variety of software tools to throw their voices. I used every process I could think of from pitch shifting to bit-crushing to radical EQs, to flipping the signals around backwards, to simulation of turntable scratching. Then I painstakingly montaged the resulting waveforms over an increasingly blurry rendition of the original music.
To be clear, I’m not all that concerend with whether the recombinant samples are obviously derived from the original composition or not. I hope it’s enjoyable either way, and that maybe I left enough bread crumbs to make it clear enough.
Mostly, though, I hope you enjoyed this film. Thanks for your time!
More work by Mike Hallenbeck for animation
More work by Mike Hallenbeck for film
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