Eclipse was my last movie project of undergrad at Virginia Tech. I was approached by student and movie creator Caitlyn Murray to score a film based on a love poem about the Sun and the Moon inspired from Debussy’s Claire de Lune. It was very dreamy and I thought to myself “How is this going to transition into film?” Needless to say, the film was experimental and ended up focusing on connections and being one with the universe.
My idea for the film was as follows:
- Create systems with pd-l2ork to allow the computer to make choices inspired by Brian Eno’s Spore soundtrack
- Use Debussy’s harmonic language and vernacular to create my own Impressionist piano piece
- Use a vector synthesizer that I built in pd-l2ork to crossfade many different nature sounds, then feeding them into a system that I built that would allow the computer to randomly capture one second snippets of it and repeat them at different speeds inspired by David Tudor’s Rainforest
- Take the piano part and feed it into a granular synth in pd-l2ork to create interesting random alterations of it, inspired by Ico Bukvic’s instruments built for L2ork’s Manu Delago Concert (I was thankfully a part of!)
Luckily, the individual pieces came together quite quickly and the soundtrack was made! Writing the piano part was fun and I even got some specific quotes from Debussy’s work in the piece. I created the soundtrack and then Caitlyn worked with it to form the scenes around the music, which I had never seen anyone do before with my work.
Overall, it was a fun little project to work on and I would love to do a surround version of it with even more nature repetitions around the room to really create a sonic forest, much like Tudor did, or even have it performed live, which could be easily done. Let me know if you have the power to do this or if you want to perform it; I have a notated version of the piano part and definitely let me or Caitlyn know what you think of the movie.