53. AND NOW ON TO DIFFERENT THINGS

And so I completed "The Music of Erich Zann." It took so much longer than I had supposed. But it turned out better than any animation I've made in the past. There were a lot of hiccups, and a lot of difficulties along the way, but I certainly learned a lot. I feel confident that the next film that I make will be even better still.

I am writing this last post as I'm watching the just-completed final version of the movie. I always have conflicted feelings after completing a big project like this. On one hand, I have a certain level of pride for my accomplishment. One the other hand, I feel as though I've let myself down; it doesn't seem as great as I'd hoped it would be. I look at it, and ask myself, "This is what I've been doing for over a year?" After contemplating that, then I realize that it's over. Perhaps it is a feeling of despair in that I now have nothing to do.

Except that I do have more work to do! On to the next project.

  The final movie. 



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52. MUSIC

I had originally sketched out the musical ideas for "The Music of Erich Zann" several months ago. However, when my hard drive crashed in August, the music was lost. However, I remembered the fundamental ideas, and different functions that I would perform on the theme, so it only took a bit of time to recreate what I had lost.

But the challenge of the music was there from the beginning. I chose this project because of the central role of music. I feel that the level of success of this film would rest with the quality of Zann's other-worldly music.

From the beginning I wondered how I would create the music. I considered making the music with electric guitar, classical guitar, or computer-generated guitar. Because of the challenges with recording live guitar, either electric or classical, I went for the easiest solution, which was to use computer-generated music. At first, I thought that I would only use the guitar, but I later felt that the terror would have its own music, and I was then able to go with more synthesized sounds.

The main musical theoretical theme that I was trying to develop was within the octonic scale, then to fill out the chromatic with the diminished seventh chord that makes up the tones not included in the octonic scale. Every measure plays on such harmonies in different ways. The octonic scale gives me a chance to exploit nightmare chords, Petruschka chords, augmented seconds, and lots of other fun and unusual harmonies that aren't in tonal scales. I hope these harmonic explorations lent to the haunted sensibility of Erich Zann's curse. 

For the nicer version of the music that Zann plays in the middle of the film, I utilized the same ideas, but rather kept the tones and harmonies within tonic scales. Thus, the music seemed different, yet the same.

I am planning to further develop these musical ideas to create a larger scale piece. I have already completed some of that; here is a live recording of what I hope to be a much larger piece. 



Website:  Contacts:       , and the film: