Music

Copycat

My latest practice drawing is done: the Enterprise from the old Star Trek movies.

I’ve drawn this ship many, many times. Mostly in grade school and high school while bored. I don’t have any of those old drawings around anymore, but I suspect this is my best rendition of it.

Part of that, I hope, is that I’m simply getting better at drawing things like this.

But part of it is probably also that I had access to a lot of reference material online, resources I didn’t have access to as a kid. I studied my subject very closely, more closely than I ever had before.

* * *

I think I saw my first vector-drawing program in 1989. The Michael Keaton Batman had just come out, the drawing program has a quarter-ellipse drawing tool, and so the first vector art I ever made was the Batman logo, made of nothing but straight lines and quarter-ellipses.

Later on, I would reproduce logos as a way of learning whatever new vector drawing programs I found. And when I discovered 3d modeling, I modeled the starship Enterprise.

I’ve made the Enterprise in Alias Sketch, AutoCad, TrueSpace, 3DS Max, Blender, Strata 3D, and even a custom modeling program I once worked on.

I’ve drawn the Enterprise on paper more times than I can count.

And this work has no value. None at all. It never occurred to me, while making these copies of logos and spaceships that I might want to spend my time producing work that had value. I was just learning.

* * *

I tried drawing many of the details of the Enterprise above from memory… and I could never do it. I always got something dramatically wrong. You’d think, after so many times drawing this, I’d be able to just do it… but to my surprise, I can’t.

I forget if I’ve mentioned it here before, but I cannot make pictures in my head. I only recently discovered that other people can. For a great overview of what it’s like to realize that, check out this Facebook post from Blake Ross.

I have no desire to dwell on it; I don’t see it as a huge limitation or disability or anything. But it does behoove me to keep it in mind — for example, I’m reading articles about learning to draw or write or compose music and the instructor mentions a technique involving visualizing something in your head, I’m going to have to remember to find a different strategy.

When drawing, I may need visual references more than most illustrators — even if those visual references are sketches I myself made. If I’m designing something, rather than just copying, I should keep my initial quarter-sized thumbnails around when making notecard-sized sketches. And keep those sketches around when making full renderings filling a page. I can’t keep my initial design explorations in my head, so I need to keep them somewhere out of my head.

* * *

For whatever reason, it never occurred to me to take this copying-things approach with music composition, not until yesterday. I have always been trying to learn to compose music by producing music for games. I decided last night it’s time to take a step back. It’s time to copy things.

So last night, I got to work reproducing this one track from Tomorrowland. After an hour, I had one measure. Which was incomplete. It was kind of stunning, how little I got done. My problem wasn’t writing; my problem was listening.

I can’t identify the instruments being used in the piece.

There are these frenetic arpeggios in the beginning and I can’t place all the notes.

My music composition software offers portato, marcato, and martele strings, but I have no idea what these styles sound like in real music.

Taking a further step back, it’s time to listen more. Not just listen to pieces and understand the melodies, but listen to the sound and learn how to deconstruct what’s going into any particular sound.

This is going to take a lot of willpower to do. I know me. I have a few things I’ve composed that I like, and I know that I’ll resent having to go back to the basics here because I can already do things. But doing isn’t my problem right now. Knowing is.

I can do things without really knowing what I’m doing, and that’s not good.

Global Game Jam 2014 Post #3: Trying for Once to Talk About Music

I don’t think I’ve ever gone into specific detail about music in a postmortem, except to say things like ‘I liked this’ or ‘this was hopelessly derivative’… I generally talk about my feelings, but not the music. So I suppose it’s time to start talking about specifics.

I’m not real sure how to talk about this. I can’t even read sheet music, and my musical vocabulary is somewhat limited.

But here’s what I’ve got:

A moody, haunted ship type thing that’s more ambience than music.

A somewhat happier, out-to-sea theme.

(Sadly, the 30 second clips above are not, like, samples of larger works. 30 seconds is all I’ve got.)

Anyway.

You were suppose to be on a spaceship. Can you tell?

Ok, not really. But it was supposed to be a spaceship. With, like consoles and windows into space and blinky lights. So I wanted something that sounded like a haunted ship.

When you were in an unlit area, the first theme would play; when you were in a lit area, it would fade to the other theme. I’ll just talk about the two separately.

the moody ambient thing

Generally, I like it, but I can’t really take credit for how it sounds. I’m using a software package called Garritan Instant Orchestra that includes pre-made instrument combos you can use, and while most are symphonic textures with names like ‘Splatty Ostinatos’ or ‘Sweeping Melodies’, some are more ambient…

…like the combo called ‘Ghost Ship’. I just opened it up and started pressing random keys. That worked well enough, but I certainly could have used it in a more interesting way.

Logically, the next step is for me to take manual control of what Instant Orchestra and my random-keys approach were doing for me automatically. If I want, Instant Orchestra allows me to play individually the instruments each pre-made combo is made of.

Ghost Ship is actually made of four unique instruments. At first glance, most seem to be drum kits, which means that they’re not playable, melodic instruments so much as collections of sound effects, each effect being tied to a different key on your piano. One key on a standard drum kit might be a big floor drum, while another key would be a cymbal crash.

So I should look at each kit, one by one, and listen to the effects, one by one, and try to think of interesting things you could do if you were controlling each kit independently, making the exact sounds you wanted, exactly when you wanted them. I should really get to know these kits, and the other kits Instant Orchestra has to offer.

the more melodic thing

When I think ‘nautical’, I think of music whose volume or pitch (or probably both) rises and falls in a gentle, rocking sort of way. I really don’t know if that would qualify as a musical cliche, but even if it does, I suppose it’s a cliche I really like.

I tried to do that with the arpeggios, trying to go for something like bubbling water there. Sadly, the arpeggios are a little hard to hear. Probably could have emphasized those more and the melody less.

As for the melody, it occurs to me just now that I probably want an instrument with a slow attack and release — meaning that when you press a key on your piano, the volume would start off really soft; as you hold the key down it gets louder, and when you release the key, the note doesn’t stop instantly, but fades out slowly.

Again, this is something I can manually control, though I tend not to.

Luckily, I think I’m kinda close to this already, but I don’t think I was consciously thinking about that whole gentle rocking thing when picking an appropriate sounding instrument.

The melody is a little slow and plodding; lots of whole notes. That goes with the whole slow rocking thing I guess, but I feel like there should be something more dynamic, too. And again, maybe emphasizing the arpeggios over the melody could help with that. I could also play arpeggios for a while, and then have it grow into a full-fledged theme with a more complex rhythm played on the same instrument.

Side note: In general, I think I try too hard to fill up all the space in my music. In visual design terms, there’s no whitespace; there are fine details, but when viewed from a distance, everything looks like the same boring grey.

If I’m having trouble making clips more than 30 seconds long, perhaps it is because I am so focused on the fine details, without a larger-scale framework in which to place them.

Sensor Sweep

Got a new Operetta build up.

I’ve also been working on a musical theme for the game.

music

I’m trying some weird chords and progressions here that I can’t even quite describe, and I like how that’s lending a sense of exoticism without just sounding like I don’t know what harmony is supposed to sound like.

However, the instrumentation is giving is this journey-though-the-desert feel, which isn’t quite what I want… I want something more adventure-on-the-high-seas.

Well, actually what I want is a similar sound to My Name is Lincoln from The Island, better known (to me) as part of the trailer music for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I want something that sounds both like sci fi and a period drama, if that’s possible.

gameplay

I’ve added a bit where things are only visible to the player if they’re close to the player, or if this new spinny radar thing of yours has recently swept over it.

This was a little difficult to pull off — it involves some custom shaders and pixel-by-pixel bitmap drawing, but I like the effect.

Right now, anything could be invisible if you’re too far away; that’s just for testing. Eventually, only objects marked as cloaked or hard to see will ever be invisible, and everything else will be visible at all times.

There’s a little bit of weirdness in the planet labels; apparently, Unity doesn’t let you use custom shaders with those. Like, at all. I was worried about that at first, but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue, since planets should never be cloaked.

Also, I’m not sure how I feel about the communication to the player about where the sensor is sweeping. Right now, there’s just a slight bit of darkness in the places you can’t see, and I like how unintrusive that looks… but it might be a little too unintrusive. I dunno.

Anyway, next I’ll be working on your item list, which will mean putting lots more work into my home-grown GUI system.

Understanding Not Required

I was playing this card game last night called Cards Against Humanity. It’s like Apples to Apples a bit. There’s a deck of question cards and a deck of answer cards. Players have a hand of answer cards, and each turn, one player draws a question card, reads it aloud, and every other player submits an answer card that they think fits the question. The player who played the funniest answer gets a point.

So for example, one of the question cards is

After the earthquake, Sean Penn brought __________ to the people of Haiti.

I tend to find absurd answers the funniest. There’s a Sean Penn answer card — you could say Sean Penn brought Sean Penn to the people of Haiti.

But in many ways, the point of the game is to be as gross or offensive as possible. This is, after all, “a party game for horrible people” according to the game’s box. So you could say Sean Penn brought pretending to care, or friendly fire, or even man meat; those are all answer cards you could play, things Sean Penn could bring to Haiti.

And those are pretty tame answers.

There are answer cards I won’t mention here, and there are many, many answer cards referencing things or acts I’m unfamiliar with, except to say I suspect they’re probably fairly naughty.

So last night was the second time I’d played this game, and I did somewhat better than the first, despite not knowing what many of the cards meant and not exactly being adept at making dirty jokes.

And I realized — it doesn’t matter whether or not I get the dirty jokes being made during the game, or whether or not I get what makes a dirty joke funny, because getting it isn’t strictly necessary for doing well. What’s necessary is a good sense of pattern matching.

* * *

Recently, some people at Google wrote some software to look at random images and try to identify and categorize important features within each images, without being told what was important or what was worth looking for. Evidently, the software decided that cats were important. I find this quote particularly interesting:

We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat’… It basically invented the concept of a cat.

It’s easy to read an article like this and think about how we would think about this, about recognizing pointy ears and slit-shaped eyes and fur and all those things about a cat that make a cat not look like a person, but this is a pretty low-level thing going on here. The Google software does not know what a cat is. It presumably knows that, in many images, this recurring pattern appears, a pattern we would recognize as a cat, but which the software has no name for.

* * *

I rather like learning new skills starting with nothing but pattern matching, but unlike the Google thing, I want to be given some instruction as to what I’m looking for. Take music, for example. I didn’t start by learning music theory. I’m not sure you can say I listened to a wide variety of works and decided on my own what sounded best. I started by listening, over and over, to works that other people have defined as good. Famous symphonies, Oscar-nominated movie scores.

The trick here is to take it on faith that what people say is good, is in fact good. And of course tastes vary, but I’d argue that you at least have to start by taking these things on faith, if you’re going to learn anything.

Sure, I’ve studied a bit of music theory in the last couple of years, but I still have trouble defining what makes these works good; they are, by definition, good. You could say I don’t know what good composition is any more than that Google software knows what cats are. I just know some patterns, and I’m not even doing that much concept invention the way Google’s thing realized that cats were a thing. What sorts of musical things are out there, that I haven’t even categorized, much less studied?

* * *

This approach only gets you so far. If you want to teach, it will be difficult. If you want to do something that’s novel but still appealing, you’ll have a hard time. And it gets frustrating sometimes, being able to do things like draw or compose or code without really understanding what you’re doing.

But it’s a good place to start, and the nice thing about this approach is, I’ve gotten ‘so far’ on a wide variety of things this way.

Speaking of which, I should probably check out YouTube videos of commonly accepted ‘good’ running form. I’m sure they’re out there.

Saving the Day

This is going to be a sort of grand finale type cue to go along with a scene near the end of Tinselfly.

My computer’s hard drive died last week, and life has been one giant install party lately. Everything was backed up, and the backups were backed up, so thankfully, this is just a minor annoyance and not the crisis it could have been.

The first application I reinstalled was Flash Builder (which I use for work-work). I’ve been trying to squeeze in as much real work in as possible between reboots and progress bars, trying to catch up. But in the interests of keeping my creative side happily fed, the second app I installed was Mixcraft, my music composition software. And the only creative, pet project type thing I’ve done in the last few days is work on this new piece of music, since I didn’t get my personal files restored until yesterday.

It’s not done of course, but considering the relatively small amount of time I’ve spent on this, I’m pretty happy.

what went right

Getting ideas. It would seem that nothing helps me flesh out a level design or story beat like composing music for it. While working on this, I figured out a pretty satisfying through-line for my protagonist that is sort of an anti-power-fantasy, but still feels heroic in its own right. That’s been the goal of the project since its inception, but I wasn’t sure how to end it in anything other than a bleak, nihilistic, deconstructive sort of way.
Short bursts. I work best in short bursts. I can engineer short bursts, but it’s difficult to fake the sort of burning need to work on something that you get when you’re desperately trying to squeeze it in with more important tasks.
The rhythm. I’ve always wanted to do something in 5/4 time. So what I did here was, I created a single-measure, blank drum track and had it loop incessantly while editing it. I could move the beats around in realtime until I got something I liked, and didn’t think about chords or melody at all. I’m pretty happy with the results. This should probably be a standard part of my process; usually, I don’t give much thought to rhythm.
Structure. There’s a bridge, and an ending — two things I’ve never done before. They need some work still, but I’m glad I forced myself to add those things in, so at least I have something to work with now.
Changing time signatures. The piece changes to 6/4 time just for the bridge. I originally had the bridge in 5/4 like everything else, and it just felt wrong. I think that was a good choice; it adds variety but doesn’t feel jarring at all to me. Also, when I use the main melody elsewhere in-game, I’d like to have it be 6/4, so it just goes to 5/4 for the finale.

what’s going wrong

Length. This is just over three minutes long, and is the longest piece I’ve ever made. If this were part of a movie or something, I suspect that would be fine. But as something you play through… my gut feeling is that anything you’re imagining as a movie scene is going to take at least 3 or 4 times as long if you want to express the same concepts as a level in a video game. While I get bored easily with repetitive action in movies, action is the supposed to be meat of the storytelling here, and repetition becomes more important.
Totally 80’s. This is supposed to feel more modern, more synthy than the other pieces of music in Tinselfly. I know it’s not everybody’s favorite thing, but I like it when movies do that during important moments. It’s a reminder that you’re being told a story; that this is, after all, about real world issues and not the issues in this made-up one. But unfortunately, I don’t think this is synthy enough to feel different from my other pieces.
Cryptomnesia. I am, as always, worried that I’m just dutifully copying something I heard before, and don’t realize it. Like, I dunno, some 80s sci-fi like Solarbabies. The beat reminds me of Mars, Bringer of War and We Belong; the introduction of the chimes make me think of Curtains, used in Myst IV; the first couple measures of the bridge, I have just realized, are just a single note off from the intro to I Dreamed a Dream. And the image I have in my head, of the visuals that go with this — a circular panning shot of a bunch of random people rushing to the edge of a sort of open-air space platform perched above a stormy gas giant — just feels like it’s been done to death. I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve just forgotten that this is all only a few days old, which I am wont to do. But, the more specific things I can think of that this is like, the more comfortable I am; the more likely I am to question what I’ve done and make this my own.
Transitions. I’ve got a main section and a bridge and an end, and that’s good… but for the most part, I think the transitions from one section to another need to be smoothed out.
Muddiness. Some of the instrument clusters just sound messy. Need to clean those up too.
Adding more themes. I really want each theme to have a clear connection to a specific character or place, and I want to make sure I don’t have so many that the whole score for this just feels like a bunch of random things I threw up there with no relationship to each other. But… I’m not sure what this theme is… maybe it will be my protagonist’s theme. Strangely, I don’t think I have one yet.

Zombie Game Trailer, Part 2

Here’s some more babbling about that Dead Island Trailer; I realized last night I missed a few things. (And, same warning as before: it’s very gory, and, I forgot to mention last time, possibly quite unsettling in other ways, especially if you have kids.)

Inevitable Doom: Zombieland

I find myself comparing the music in the trailer to Estasi Dell Anima, the big climactic battle cue from Zombieland. Maybe just because they’re both about zombies, but they’re also sort of communicating similar emotions in similar ways. And hey, if you’re going to score something about the inevitable destruction of the good guys, chances are good that you’re doing it for a zombie-themed something or other.

So… inevitability. First off, both pieces are very repetitive. They’re not about a changing, dynamic scene so much as a single moment, stretched out to the length of a song. They also have very simple beats: the relentless quarter notes in Dead Island; the whole notes in Zombieland that give way to some 3/4 violin wailing. Nothing says endless like a waltz. Worked so well for Gladiator. 🙂

From what I can recall, this sort of incessant, repetitive drum-beating is pretty common to slow-motion scenes of death and destruction.

(Incidentally, it occurs to me that Zombieland, structurally, is very similar to what I’d like to do with Tinselfly. Simple coming-of age story wrapped in an end-of-the-world scenario. I may have to watch that again.)

Shortcuts: Star Trek

It’s not like I was invested in the characters in the Dead Island trailer. It’s not like we get to know them real well. They’re an archetypal happy family who thought they were going on vacation. There’s a rugged dad, a panicking mom, an innocent little girl. By the time the trailer was over I was a bit misty, but if I was engaged, it was only because the characters were easily recognizable archetypes. Would this have worked if the kid were a scruffy teenage boy? With a same-sex couple? An axe-wielding mom? I don’t know.

Reminds me a bit of the opening of the latest Star Trek, where we spend a few minutes with a couple we really know nothing about. We’ll never see them again, but the scene is touching anyway because there are certain backdoors into our collective psyches that just work, despite our best attempts to be cynical about them: family; protecting a child; someone giving birth.

I have mixed feelings about this, but despite my aversion to gender-specific stereotypes and whatnot, I mostly don’t have a problem with using archetypes, at least not in something this short. Again, from that interview:

On the subject of the Daughter character specifically, we were aware that there was an impact about that choice for sure, but I think that choice fitted the narrative we wanted to tell and was appropriate in that sense.

As the audience you feel that fear much more strongly through the eyes of a child. Some people will see that as being ‘manipulative’ which is fair enough. It draws you in, makes you care. That’s quite a hard thing to do in 2 minutes and as some commentators have pointed out all effective fiction is ultimately manipulative in that sense.

I totally agree that all fiction in manipulative. It’s your job as a writer to produce specific reactions in your audience at specific times. That’s manipulation. And the shorter your work is, the more dirty tricks you’re going to have to use.

I guess the line I’d draw is that I’m ok with archetypes as long as you’re communicating the nature of said archetype using their clothes and body language and grooming — stuff independent of their gender, age or color. So you could have had a clean-shaven, panicking dad in a festive Hawaiian shirt, and an axe-wielding mom with scruffy hair, visible muscle definition and a sports jersey, and you’d still get your easily identifiable family that you can connect to.

Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from a 3 Minute Zombie Game Trailer

Guess I’m a bit late to the party, but I just saw the much-talked-about Dead Island Trailer. (Warning: it’s very gory.)

Despite some slightly janky motion capture, I think this is the most beautiful game trailer I’ve ever seen. Not that I’ve seen a lot of video game trailers, but hey, I found it more moving than most movie trailers anyway. And I find myself obsessing over this. Maybe it’s just that I’ve had a lot going through my head lately and my thoughts decided to all coalesce here. Who knows. So here are some random thoughts.

More than anything, I’m obsessing over the music. It’s really elegant and effective. So I thought I’d try to reproduce it as best I could.

Here’s my version of the first phrase. It’s not quite there, but I think it’s a solid effort.

Despite — or perhaps because of — the simplicity of the original piece, this was really hard to pull off. Here’s what I learned:

Pay attention to velocity. If you play all the notes at the same velocity, or loudness, the piece sounds like crap. There’s no sense of forward movement, no rhythm. Just a bunch of monotonous quarter notes. There’s no percussion or anything keeping the beat, so it’s up to the melody itself to tell you where each measure starts. So apparently, you want the first note (of four) to be loudest, and your third note to be the second loudest. So the beginnings of your measures are well defined, and the beginnings of each half-measure are pretty evident too. But it’s got to be pretty subtle… seems like one of those things where if you do it right, everything sounds even, even though it’s really not. Sadly, I don’t have the coordination to do this in realtime, any more than I can use the pressure sensitivity of my pen tablet effectively, so I had to manually alter the velocity of each of my notes after playing them, one by one. Gotta practice doing this for real.
Use your mod wheel. The mod wheel is this dial on a keyboard that does… stuff. It’s different for different instruments. Sometimes it gives things more vibrato; sometimes it makes things warble in this really strange way. For the violin I used here, it softens the sound of the instrument — both in terms of volume and the sharpness of the sound. I’ve never really used the mod wheel before, but here it was essential to get the violin to swell and taper off like it does in the original piece.
Tremolo is fun and easy. The violin does this barely audible tremolo in the beginning. At first I wasn’t sure I could do it since I don’t have a ‘tremolo violin’ instrument, but it was easy enough to get that effect by, well, doing tremolo — by rapidly vibrating my finger on the note being played.
Filters can do more than make echoes. So there’s this piano in my music software. And yeah, it sounds like a real piano, and I could play the song on that… but it sounded totally wrong. Too bright, too happy. The original piece’s piano has this sort of muffled sound. I started with a reverb filter, which is the only filter I’d used before, mostly to make things sound like they’re being played in big stone halls. It helped, but wasn’t quite enough. So I added an equalizer filter too, to chop out high frequencies. That dramatically changed the sound of the instrument, and I got much closer to the sound I wanted with that.
Key matters. My inclination when analyzing a new song is to transpose it to C — to change the pitches of everything so you’re just using the white notes of the piano. I did that here, and something felt off, so on a whim I put everything back in the right key. And then it sounded a lot better. I really don’t understand why yet.
Simple, common chord progressions are fine. This starts with a I-V-I-V-VI progression, which as I understand it is fairly common. (Also recently noticed that How to Train Your Dragon uses a very common pattern.) I should study some of the more commonly used progressions out there; I have a list in one of my books already.

Gimmicks

The bulk of the trailer is filmed backwards. It works extraordinarily well, and there’s a great sense of closure to the way it ends (begins?)… to the father reaching for the daughter, but since it’s backwards, he’s getting ever farther from her.

There’s a scene in Tinselfly I’d wanted to go backwards, but it’s not a particularly emotional scene; it’s more expository. There is a particularly emotional scene I was planning on doing forwards, but now I’m wondering what it would be like backwards.

You could rightly call that gimmicky, blatantly aping this or Braid or whatever, but as far as I’m concerned, if the story is better communicated by doing this part backwards, then I’ll do it backwards. It’s only a gimmick if you’re using some avant garde approach because you think it’s cool and not because you think it will work.

Game Trailers

There’s this interview about the making of this trailer, and I found this quote particularly interesting:

To an extent a full CG trailer is always a different experience to actually playing the game. It isn’t trying to pretend to be game play, like a lot of CG trailers do, at all. It’s more trying to tell a story in the same world but in a different medium that describes an event that is illustrative of the type of interactive experience you might have when playing. All we have tried to do is tell that story as effectively as possible.

I have to admit there’s a certain logic to this. And the results are kind of refreshing. I never get much of a sense of gameplay from trailers anyway, so why not use this medium to do what it’s best suited for?

Though on the other hand, you could apply this logic to demos and argue that they should ‘tell a story in the same world’, but in a highly abbreviated fashion compared to the game story proper. I think that might be interesting.

Damage

Here’s another thing related to Tinselfly. On its own, I don’t mind gore, but here, it weirds me out a little because the characters are a little cartoony. It’s like… dismembering Wile E Coyote. Sure, you can flatten him and have bombs explode near him, but it’s all cartoony violence to go with the cartoony character who will react like a rubber toy, not like something that’s made of skin and muscle and brain matter.

I don’t intend for Tinselfly to have particularly violent gameplay (not in the story mode proper anyway, but that’s a long discussion). However, there will be violence here and there, and I have every intention of making said violence come off as brutal and visceral as I can make it. Now, that’s different from gore, but the issues are similar. She’s not finished yet, and I’m not saying this will happen, but could I, say, have my Robin character model be crushed to death on camera? I think I’ve asked that before, but I still don’t know the answer to that.