Having finished up the few counterpoint and orchestration related online courses at the end of the summer I was keen to get cracking on some composing again. In order to create ‘fake’ projects/briefs for practice material I previously used randomly chosen pages from books as a basis to build a short score on. I’ve expanded abit on that and now use a few dice to specify length (1-3 minutes), film-genre and influence. Storywise I’m using the book of Annotated Brothers Grimm tales as source material. There’s about 46 storys in total and I’m hoping by the end I’ll have fine tuned my workflow some aswell as built up a more unusual showreel. I’m currently on the third track and find the random influence a big help with initial direction/ideas (e.g #3 is: a Western style horror with Hungarian folk influence). This is handy for avoiding the usual rhythms I have a tendency to come up with due to my limited keyboard skills. I’m hoping to also complete an illustration to go with each track, something that will add abit of originality and visual interest when I add the songs to the wesbsite portfolio aswell as promoting to production companies. All going well this is something I should be able to introduce to the KDMC course too.
On the commission front I’ve been busy with alot of logo work the last two weeks. One for an architectural firm and another for a good friend of mine, a personal trainer based in Australia. The architectural concepts have been unusual in that they take a more holistic/less corporate approach than most firms but are still involved in some big projects so I needed to be keep any imagery fairly subtle and abstract. For the PT logo it needed to be something that also worked as a t-shirt design and encompassed the different services on offer (health, strength and rehab). We tried a bunch of different ideas including cartoon strongmen, silhouettes and Vitruvian man figures but in the end settled on a stylized bull.
