Today, when talking about syncing shots to music, I was reminded of a project I started a couple of years ago but never finished, inspired by Pepper’s Theme by Kevin MacLeod:
The project was of a couple who meet, and you watch them slowly fall in love. The ‘camera’ never moves, and you only glimpse their changing relationship from their encounters in the specific location (a train station) until one day the girl stops appearing. The mood shifts with the music, the quiet piano at first accompanies their first encounters with each other, possibly over a few weeks, standing next to each other but never really talking. When the music picks up they have began to talk, and gradually look more comfortable around each other, bringing each other gifts and even walking into frame as a pair. Then when the music dies down again, she stops appearing and you watch the other character as he at first seems lost, looking for her, and after a while stops acting as though he expects her to show up at all. You see him get older, until eventually he stops showing up too. The final shots would change the angle you see the action from, and you watch the man – young again – walking up the platform and reaching out his hand. It changes to a POV shot of the girl, the same age as when she stopped appearing at the station, grabbing his hand and then smiling. The angle would then go back to normal, showing the couple standing together, young again.
The problems I had when actually animating the short was:
a) a lack of patience to properly animate the sequences, and
b) each change in the music seemed to take to long to occur when it actually came to making the animation.
Of course, perhaps now that I have more time on my hands I could even go back into this and attempt it once more, but for now, I just thought it was a good example of how something such as a song can not only inspire an idea, but also influence it in terms of editing and mood. I was happy to be reminded of this otherwise forgotten idea!
