Norman McLaren « Pen Point Percussion »
Norman McLaren « Pen Point Percussion »
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM
Everything with a sound looks like.
An artist might picture it this way.
But a musician sees it differently.
The sound engineer has an oscilloscope to help him see sounds. Let’s have a few notes on a guitar.
And there is another way these notes can be seen.
The vibrating strings set up vibrations in the air which travel to the microphone and then an electronic device translate them into vibrations of light.
This narrow beam of light is photographed on movie film and gives you the soundtrack which doesn’t appear on the screen. But let’s bring it up of hiding where we can see it. C’mon… alright now… give us that guitar again.
So that’s a picture of the guitar notes… Well can you show some other instrument ?
Aha. What else can you do ?
Not bad, try again.
You know that’s a modified looking voice. Wonder what you could do with my voice. Shall we try it ?
THIS – IS – MY – VOICE
Eh wait a minute, let’s hold that still and at it again. So that’s how my voice looks. Like every other sound it has its own distinct pattern of light and dark running down the side of a film.
Well if a sound will make a pattern on film, a pattern on film will make a sound. You can even create your own sounds by drawing directly on a film. Norman McLaren, the motion picture artist, has been making some hand drawing sounds and now he’s going to hear them for the first time, played on a movie??? a sort of miniature movie projector.
It’s not just guess work, the sound of any of these patterns of lines can be calculated : the size controls the loundness, a row of small marks would sound like this…
Larger marks are louder sound. That’s simple enough. Then there is the tone quality, it’s controlled by the shape of the marks. This series of thin straight lines give a sharp rather unpleasant sound. But these round dots are a bit smoother there. The marks can be any shape you like. Now how about this? Using a brush, Norman tries (?) a row of small triangles. These sharp angular forms what were they sound like ?
The distance the lines are apart controls pitch with the lines far appart a low pitch note…
A medium…
And a high note…
Now what can they be used for these hand drawing sounds ? Well, Norman McLaren finds that they are perfectly natural complement to some of his hand-drawn pictures. Each movment of the sceen can have its own specially designed sound. Making movies this way the artist has direct personnal control at every stage of the film’s production, sound and picture are planned and closely related to each other as they are drawn.
Now Norman is checking to make sure that each bit of sound is perfectly matched to its accompanying screen action.
Finally the picture and the sound will be printed together on one lenght of film and color will be added during the process.
