LO1: Piano Recording – Attempt 1
On the 16th of March, I met up with one of the animators, William Healy, to attempt some piano recording. Healy wanted to perform the piano pieces himself but unfortunately hadn’t written any songs for the animation. He had an idea of performing an existing piece of music but that could infringe on some copyright laws unless we had some form of permission to use said piece. On top of that, the performance would also require some sort of acting as the in-film character gets interrupted a couple of times throughout his performances.
We needed to improvise a song but we also needed it to sync with certain actions within the visuals. And so, within my DAW, I placed markers on the timeline to show when key events would happen. I pulled the video window below the timeline and informed Healy of what action/event each marker represented. I then asked him if he could try playing the piano while watching the markers on the timeline. As a result, he played the piano and took each event into consideration in his performance. For example, there’s one scene in the animation in which the performer gets abruptly interrupted by a man pointing a gun at him. When the marker representing that scene passed, Healy was able to abruptly stop playing the piano in sync with the animatic.
Some of the markers used to inform the performer of in-scene events.
Our method seemed to work smoothly. However, when we later reviewed the recordings we noticed a few issues:
- Healy wasn’t impressed by his performance.
- The microphones picked up some unwanted noises (such as a squeaky pedal).
- I had recorded the piano in mono.
We’re going to try getting some more recordings soon. This time, we might apply some oil to the piano pedals and/or change the mic placement to avoid picking-up the unwanted sounds. Healy also said he would practice a bit more beforehand. If all fails, we might have to resort to using either an electric piano/keyboard or some form of MIDI software.
While explaining a few alternative ways of producing some piano parts, I noticed that Healy had a difficult time understanding some of the terms I was using. He asked me what I meant when using terms like ‘EQ’ and ‘MIDI’. This leads me to my next post… (See Research and Production Post 4).