The Eerie Sounds Of Saturn

Jóhann Jóhannsson Inspiration

"Heptapod B" by Jóhann Jóhannsson has caught my eye, especially in it's effect of creating a slow, yet intelligent climax. Using both human voice in a staccato style, it brings a sense of humanity in a seemingly alien world. In our media piece, we aim to have a floating astronaut as our central character, if we were to use humanised sounds such as audio speech or synthesised voices we might be able to bring a similar human effect in our Sci-Fi piece. In terms of sound in space, if we were to steer away from orchestral ambience and have a purely muted space environment it might be interesting using a 'breathing' sound from the astronaut from the perspective of the human's ears inside the helmet.


This piece by Jóhannsson also includes effective use of percussion, such as pounding drum hits which adds to the eventual climax. It's bassier frequency contrasts to the higher pitched voices and strings which effectively creates a carefully crafted dynamic range.

Hans Zimmer Inspiration

Hans Zimmer constructs this melodic piece in Sci-Fi thriller, Interstellar (2014). The build up in orchestral arrangements including strings and organ provides a slow but beautiful progressive composition. I like how he creates multiple crescendos and decrescendos to enhance the dynamic range of the soundtrack, yet there is enough balance between the loud and delicate moments to get across the tension. This is something I aim to incorporate with the visuals, ensuring there is a balance of atmospheric and engaging sound to provide a diegetic experience for the audience.

Light Flares

When previewing the renders of our first shot we felt that there was something slightly missing. We were happy with the earth, slow zooming camera movement and the animation of the astronaut but we felt that the visuals looked a little dark and the frame looked a little empty. So we therefore opted to included some light flares around the horizon of the earth's surface. We applied a lens flare in the light options. There were many types of lens flares in different shapes, colours, sizes. We found an icy blue flare which contributed to the lighting and colour of the scene, complementing the colour of the earth and star field. What we also light is the fact that when the camera rotates and moves, the light flare reacts accordingly to the movement and moves itself. We believe that this technique implies the impression of using a real camera and allows us to take a realist stance when making. The camera options in C4D allow us to experiment with different apertures, focal lengths and lens types which allowed us to get a great diversity in camera angles and shot types.

Title Ideas

Title Brainstorming Session

Zero Gravity/GRAVITY
Apollo
Mission ____
M O O N
COPY THAT
LUNAR
ORB
NORTH MOON
Nearside/Farside
ORBIT
Retrograde
Fall Moon
Fallen
Lost
Sea of Tranquility

TRANSLUNAR

We decided to choose the title 'Translunar' due to its relevance to our narrative. Possessing the definition, "relating to or denoting the trajectory of a spacecraft travelling between the earth and the moon.", we felt as though this encapsulated our main idea fairly well in comparison to our other ideas. Furthermore, this had a sense of uniqueness about it that the other titles did not, making our film standout somewhat and potentially providing the production with a feel of credibility.

Diegetic & Non-Diegetic Sound

In a film score or a visual narrative, sound can be used in two different ways. Artists can choose to use purely digetic or non-diegetic sound, or they can incorporate both methods together to create a desired effect.

Diegetic Sound

Sound is diegetic, if its visually connected or implied in the moving image. 

For example, an actor's spoken dialogue, or objects on screen, e.g. footsteps, clapping, birds tweeting.

A visible source is shown on the screen, while an implied source is still part of the film world but not shown on the screen.

Non-Diegetic Sound

Sound is non-diegetic, if the source is not present or implied in the narrative universe. 

Common instances are:

• music or score, used to augment emotions
• actor’s commentary or narration
• any extra sound added for effect

Non-diegetic sound can also be reffered to as non-literal sound, or commentary.

In our transmedia practice, I aim to use both diegetic and non-digetic sound to link both the outside and inside sources together. This I feel with provide a cinematic experience, especially with the non-diegetic space commentary, music, and diegetic space soundscape. 

I noticed how in the film 'Rocky' the punches and crowd cheering is diegetic. However, Rocky’s fanrare and musical theme, is non-diegetic.

Props for scene

Another way we thought that we could develop our scene was to include several props. We began by applying textures to models and placing them in our scene. However, the inclusion of the props seemed to over complicate the visuals and opposed our intention of making it simple and focusing on the astronaut. If we wanted to include all the props then we would've allowed a significant amount of screen time to the props and introduce them effectively. Below, shows the scene with the props. It is well too complicated and crowded and the aesthetics of the props didn't suit the landscape and overall look of the seen. 

We decided to only include props that we felt were necessary, ones which potentially added to the narrative. We wanted to only include a satellite in our piece in order to allow us to progress with the narrative and introduce the new planet that the astronaut falls on. It could also provide us with the means of including some interesting audio.

Trying mountains

We decided that we wanted to develop our scene and terrain more and also give a sense of distance by including mountains in the far background of our piece. We hoped this helped portray the vastness of the landscape, showing how isolated the subject is. To do this we used the landscape generator tool and enhanced the number of segments and furrows in the mountain. We were then able to experiment with the different mountain types by changing the seed, size, orientation and plateau of the landscape. Once we got the shape that we wanted the mountain to be we applied further noise types such as blistered turbulence, poxo and stupl in the bump setting. This gave the landscape the correct texture of a mountain.

Once we achieve the final result and placed it in the scene something didn't feel right. We came to the conclusion that the mountains didn't fit in with the rest of the scene texture wise aesthetically. So we therefore decided to include a much simple mountain in the background once again using the mountain generator and altering the seed. We then applied the same material to the mountains that we previously applied to planet surface. We feel that our final result looks much simpler/realistic as well as reducing the render time.

Making the Moon

Having already worked out the process of building a planet in C4D after creating the Earth, we endeavoured to create our moon using a very similar process. Considering the level of detail we managed to achieve was fairly reasonable, the effort that went into building the moon was mostly minimal. Beginning with a simple sphere object, we used the colour material editor to apply an image wrap around the shape. The key here was finding an image that was of a high enough resolution to ensure that the moon did not pixelate around the large moon shape, and that the level of detail remained strong even as the moon is navigated around and moved closer to. We found a 8K image wrap from NASA's official catalogue, which provided us with the level of sharpness and detail that we were looking for. I then edited this image using Adobe Photoshop to bring out the contrast and sharpness further in order to create the best result possible. After this, the we subdivided the sphere shape in order to remove any faces that the sphere had, making it as smooth and round as possible.

Although creating this moon was a fairly simple task, the difficulty in making it look realistic came when lighting it. The images below show the various test renders we carried out using various lighting set ups.

Here, we can see how the moon visuals progressed through different lighting experiments. As can be seen, the level of atmosphere and ambience changes dramatically with the different lighting set ups. A simple three point lighting set up was our final choice, experimenting a great deal with intensity levels until we found a set up where each light complimented one another, not only a detailed image but a dramatic tone.

Astronaut animation

When wanting to create the astronaut animations we had to result in using the mixamo software where we rigged our astronaut by applying joints and armatures. When this astronaut was rigged, the software converted it into several animations which we intended to use throughout. We decided to use this software due to our own attempts of animation not seeming realistic or natural enough. Also when doing it ourselves, it was too temperamental as sometimes the animation would work and other times it wouldn't. So our only option was to use the service of mixamo. These animations look very realistic and natural and they also flow relatively well between each other. This was also very effective as we were able to edit the overdrive, speed, body position etc. of the astronaut, ultimately giving us various means to make it our own. Below are screenshots of a few of the animations that we exported.

1. crawling

2. floating - In this floating animation we were able to turn down the overdrive in order to make it seem as if the astronaut was moving in slow motion - perfect for our introductory scene of the subject floating in space.

3. looking around

When importing the files into C4D we then had to create our own materials for the astronaut. This included materials for the suit, gloves and boots as well as the helmet and visor. When creating the material for the suit we had to ensure that we didn't have any reflectance showing - because as previously shown, this caused a lot of noise and unwanted flickering. To avoid this we applied some diffusion and colour in order to get the final texture. Also in order to get the reflective material of the visor without using the reflectance setting, we used the environment setting on the material which reflected the surrounding environment. We also experimented with key framing the movements furher in terms of speed in order to correspond to the pacing of our piece.

Creating our planet surface

Here we began to create the planet surface that would feature in our scene. We started off by inserting a simple plane in the project. Then, in order to achieved the aspired rocky planet texture we experimented with applying a created material, altering the noise types and levels in the displacement and bump settings. In the bump setting we applied several noise shaders such as standard noise, blistered turbulence,wavy turbulence, FBM, LUKA and voronoi 1. We also included a layer shader which allowed us to overlay and apply several noise types to the material.

 We realised that we also needed to lower some of the intensities of the noise types as the given effect was far to drastic and didn't achieve our intention of creating a realistic surface/landscape.

 After applying the noise in the bump settings we felt that we created a rather realistic texture, however we felt that the surface looked too flat. We then decided to experiment with the displacement levels in order to alter to physical shape of the flat plane. We once again tried different noise levels such as types like poxo, FBM and blistered turbulence. We also found a 'tiles' shader which applied a continuous pattern throughout the texture, and added topography.

We then had to turn down the intensity of the effect as we only wanted to make the surface slightly uneven and irregular and also implying a sense of depth. We also considered the colour of the surface and weighed up the outcomes. We felt that the orange surface looked too alienating and more like the surface or mars whereas a white/grey surface looked more like the moon and more familiar to the audience. Ultimately, we found a happy medium by eventually deciding to use the white/grey and an area light with a slightly warm colour tint. This light was very successful in making our scene look more atmospheric as I contributed to the contrast and highlighted the depth of the material applied to the plane. We positioned the light source fairly low to the surface in order to achieve hard shadows and turned down the intensity slightly to apply low key lighting. 

Progression of Planet Surface:

                                     

History of Music in Film

Pre-1930s Before the invention of the "talking picture," all movies were completely silent.  The majority of silent films were accompanied by anything from full orchestras to organists and pianists. Books of music were published to provide the accompanists with ideas for scene music, categorized by mood, event, or element. Many of the films came with a "suggestion list" of what music to play in which scene The 1930s With the advent of the talking pictures, music once again established itself as a vital element in the film industry. At first, sound films followed the precedent set by their ancestors, using compiled "western music".  Original scores came into play with Max Steiner writing the first completely original score for King Kong in 1933. Towards the latter half of the decade, the composers began to experiment and to develop their own style of unobtrusively supporting the film’s plot and characters. The 1940s Bernard Herrmann, broke many barriers and traditions to create music that greatly enhanced the films for which he wrote. For example, 'Citizen Kane Suite', which provided beautiful dynamic range, with many orchestral arrangements.  The 1950s Up until the 1950s, film music had been entirely symphonic. In the 1950s, however, Jazz opened the industry up to a vast and new world of possibilities. Although it had been used for musicals and animated films, it had never been used in mainstream genre films of the 1930s and 1940s.  The use of Jazz not only "contemporized" the sounds and theme of movies, but fewer musicians were needed, thus making orchestration less expensive. The 1960s The use of jazz and other experiments continued on into the 1960s. It was in this decade that acceptance of new music led to the scoring of INSERT TITLE HERE, the first movie to use a rock soundtrack. The 1970s The 1970s passed with very little new innovation. The decade was spent perfecting things learned in the previous decade. People such as John Williams created scores using these techniques that are highly memorable, even today. The 1980s and the 1990s The first widespread use of synthesized sounds in films occurred in the 1980s and film scoring once again underwent a major revolution.  For the first time, it became theoretically possible to score an entire film with only one performer – using the synthesizer to produce the sounds of many instrumentalists, possible through MIDI for example. Popular songs could become the basis for film scores. Today, with the daily development of new technology and the general knowledge gained from a century of experiences, film composers have the ability to create the perfect score – accenting the movie’s plot and characters in such a way that it enhances the film and turns it into an experience. Reference: http://www.twyman-whitney.com/film/essentials/music-history.html

Star field

Here we wanted to continue to develop our scene further by including different aspect to familiarise the audience with the setting. Firstly, we decided that we wanted to include a star field in the background of the piece which imply a sense of depth and distance. To do this we first began by experimenting with the exploding effect included in C4D's interface. This, exploded a sphere, leaving the fragments of the object scattered around the scene.

 We ultimately decided against using this method for a few reasons:
1. The several fragments included in the scene would increase the rendering time dramatically.
2. The fragments weren't the correct shape or small enough to look like stars.


We tried to overcome this issue by applying an image of a star field into the texture of a material on a  flat plane to get past the render time issue. However, this only worked with shots with minimal camera movement because as the camera moved, the edges of the plane would come into the shot and therefore didn't fill the background completely. If we zoomed in closer to the plane then the image seemed pixelated, so we then made a collage of images of star fields and then applied that to the plane instead which allowed us to make the plane larger without losing that much detail.

We also tried using the background tool which wrapped in image continuously around the scene without losing any detail. This works very successfully with still shots. However when it came to moving shots and camera movement there was a problem. Due to the fact that the stars were set as the constant background, they didn't react to the camera movement and just stayed still in the frame. However, after rendering the clips, we imported the animations into premier pro and then applied further zooms, pans and tilts which counteracted this issue.

Storyboard

Visual Inspiration: Gravity/A Space Odyssey (Establishing Location)

The two feature films above, Alfonso Cuaron's 'Gravity' and Kubricks '2001: A Space Oddeyssey' provided us with a plethora of visual inspiration in the planning process of our film. As we obviously could not undertake any visual primary research, all of our inspiration had to come from secondary sources i.e previously existing films such as these. We found using these sources particularly insightful, particularly when creating establishing shots, as it was important for us that we created a realistic, life-like representation of outer space, particularly in terms of scale and lighting aesthetics.

2001: A Space Oddeyssey

Gravity

Translunar

Above, some similarities can be seen between Gravity, A Space Odyssey and our production, especially in terms of the scaling and minor details such as the slight level of atmosphere around the earth. However, we decided to take the aesthetics slightly further by adding a starfield around the Earth. We felt that this would enhance the cinematic/dramatic aspect, although not necessary being representative of the view from space.

Final Synopsis - ready to storyboard

Our piece is about an astronaut who finds himself drifting and floating in space after detaching from the space station. He begins to peacefully float around the earth, observing it and recording what he sees. Things eventually take a turn for the worse as he begins to float away from earth without any attachment to his space station and his jets stop working. After a while of floating in space he comes across an alien planet which looks particularly eerie. As he edges closer and closer to the planet, without acknowledging it, its gravitational pull begins to drag him down to the surface. He free falls down to the surface of the planet where he comes to a halt. As he gets up, brushes himself down and begins to look around, a tiny rock falls down and hits him on the head. The astronaut looks around in shock and confusion. Gradually more and more rocks begin to fall and the astronaut realises the turn off events - realising the gravity of this planet is causing debris in space to be crash towards the planet. The astronaut begins to panic and run when he realises a large meteor heading his way. As it gets closer and closer he freezes, acknowledging his inevitable death.

History of motion graphics

Intro to motion graphics:

One of the first uses of the term “motion graphics” was by animator John Whitney, who co-founded Motion Graphics, Inc. in 1960 to create motion picture and television title sequences. However, motion graphics dates back to before electronic media, sometime back in the 1800’s with presentation flipbooks.

Motion graphics, in a nutshell, is any graphics that use technology to create an illusion of motion, transformation, or rotation in order to communicate messages through video and audio storytelling. Motion graphics includes things such as films, videos, animated text, and web-based animation, among other things and the field has quickly evolved as a direct result of improvements in technology.Saul Bass (1920-1996)

Practitioners:

Saul Bass (1920-1996)

Saul Bass is a great name in the field of motion graphics and is a major pioneer in the development of feature film title sequences. Although he had a memorable career as a graphic designer, his film titling work and poster design is what really made him stand out. His designs were simple, but they effectively communicated the mood of the films. Some noteworthy title sequences he created were for films such as The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), Psycho (1960), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995.)

Check out a brief visual history of his most celebrated work in “The Title Design of Saul Bass”: https://vimeo.com/31992143

John Whitney (1917-1995)

John Whitney is considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. In 1960, he was one of the first to use the term “motion graphics” when he founded Motion Graphics, Inc., in order to create motion picture and television title sequences through his own mechanical analogue computer invention. One of his most famous works was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Vertigo” in 1958, collaborating with Saul Bass, which featured swirling graphics growing from small to large.

Vertigo Title Sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DU0IVmBgsQ

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003)

Stan Brakhage is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film. He explored a variety of formats, creating a large, diverse body of work. Some of his approaches and techniques included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, collage film, and the use of multiple exposures. You can see his influence in the credits of the film Seven (1995), designed by Kyle Cooper, with the scratched emulsion, rapid cutaways, and bursts of light in his style; this work received critical acclaim.

Pablo Ferro (1935-)

An American graphic designer and film titles designer, Pablo Ferro was a pioneer of quick-cut editing and multiple screen images animation (the first in film and television in 1963.) Winning over 70 national and international awards, his work is featured in popular films such as Philadelphia, Beetlejuice, Men in Black, and A Clockwork Orange. His titles and montage sequences have appeared in 12 Academy Award winning films.

See his design work in the compilation “Pable Ferro: A Career Retrospective”: https://vimeo.com/90413568

Norman McLaren (1914-1987)

As an animator and filmmaker, Norman McLaren was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound. He developed a number of groundbreaking techniques for combining and synchronizing animation with music.

Kyle Cooper (1962-)

One of today’s major players in the motion graphics industry, Kyle Cooper is an American designer of motion picture title sequences. He studied under the great Paul Rand at Yale University and his work in film title design is often compared to Saul Bass. His work for the title sequence of Seven (with influences from Stan Brakhage) really raised the bar creatively, and you can see his work in other popular films such as the Spiderman Trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007), Sherlock Holmes (2009), and in popular TV shows including The Walking Dead (2010) and American Horror Story (2011.)

Source: http://www.triplet3d.com/the-history-of-motion-graphics