Out of the four emotions listed in my previous post, each of our group members decided to work primarily on one each with the fourth “hopelessness” being a collaborative piece utilising heavily edited components from the other three. The emotion I assigned myself was tranquillity; it is a vastly different mood to pretty much all work I’ve done previously in the class, and I have several instruments at home that I believe will fit perfectly within this theme.

For the audio I wanted to feature more musical elements than I did in my previous classwork of the soundscape and exquisite corpse; for me personally, music can provide a strong sense of calm, so it was an obvious choice for my theme. I’ll primarily be using a steel tank drum to achieve an ambient base for the piece; I’ve always loved the dreamy tone and strong resonant qualities this instrument provides, and although this might make getting a clean recording more difficult depending on the acoustics of the room, I believe this resonance will make the piece feel very intrinsic, which I discussed the benefits of in the previous post. The primary melodic elements will be from both the piano and kalimba, though melody will be somewhat minimal and sparse as to not detract from the piece’s intended ambient qualities. I want to limit the amount of non-musical field recordings used, as environmental sound can be detrimental to a non-diegetic sound (previous post), however I will likely incorporate some exaggerated human sound, such as breathing or humming to give the effect of the character being at ease with their surroundings.

Visually I wanted to primarily focus on nature, with several cinematic (hopefully) close-ups of plant detail, water etc. The POV elements will show the character interacting with nature in a way that invokes a sense of connectivity and calm, such as brushing past leaves or lying in the grass. I’ll be keeping visual effects to a minimum in complying with the natural theme, however I will add some overexposure either in post-production or during the actual filming, depending on the conditions.