Technical Theatre 6

Homework assignment:

For our homework while Becca was away, we had to fill in a sound quiz and choose a song which we could edit thirty seconds from.
I found the sound quiz all right to do, because having the extensive research facilities like the internet made it more easily accessible to learn about the things in the quiz.
The song I chose was Arabella by the Arctic Monkeys. I chose this sound because it has really strong beats and I thought it would be good to play around with them, particularly the drumming and guitar. I also wanted to play about with editing bits of the lyrics as I thought it could sound good because Alex Turner's voice is so gorgeous.

My thoughts on the technical aspects of the second year's drama performance:

I thought that the sound and lighting for the performance really added dramatic effect to the pieces of drama, and had a large influence on the atmosphere.
The sound was used interestingly, I was particularly taken with some of the sound effects and music that they used for the third story, a nice combination of these creepy, almost inhuman sounds and eerie melodies which really made you feel on edge and like you were in the dreamland that was in the story, or rather in the main character's mind.
I also thought the lighting stood out at several points, the ones that come to mind are also from the third story, actually, although there was nice spotlighting in all three pieces at at least one point.
In the third story, the lighting turned very dark at some points and added to that dark theme of the drama, which made it look really cool.
I can't think of anything I would have changed about the technical effects for the performance, it all seemed to be perfectly on time and I thought the lighting and sound all fitted really well.

Song editing:

Today, Wednesday the 21st, we spent the lesson putting our songs into Logic Pro and editing them.
We were split into teams, my team was Ryan, Mo and I.
This is how we did it:

First, we needed to rip the music we wanted to use. To do this we had to use an MP3 converter online, by copying and pasting the Youtube urls from the videos of our songs into the converter before downloading it. Then we used ITunes to transfer it from downloads into Logic Pro.
Next, we started editing our songs, cutting them together.
We had to have thirty seconds of each of our song within our project, but the seconds could be spread about wherever we wanted them.
We listened to all three songs, Mr. Blue Sky, Body Language and Arabella, and then we decided which one we wanted to be the start of our piece of music.
We chose Body Language to start with. About seven seconds in, we cut it, and edited Mr. Blue Sky to start then, from about two seconds in.
Then we cut to the chorus of Mr. Blue Sky, then cut in the chorus of Arabella. Once the end of the Arabella chorus came, the bridge of Mr. Blue Sky came on and Arabella continued to play at the same time. Then we cut out the chorus of Body Language and set it to play at the same time as the two bits of the other song, so that all three were overlapping, with the other two being the backing to Body Language.
Arabella and Mr. Blue Sky then stopped after their instrumental parts ended, and Body Language played through to the end of the chorus and stopped, ending our whole song.
To edit the different seconds of the songs together, we had to work out which seconds we needed from the songs, and use the Split by Playhead button to cut those parts out.
At first we were just getting used to it and made a few mistakes, but once we got to grips with it it was ok.
We played it through a few times at each time the song changed to make sure the transition would sound good, and once we had put all of the clips together, we listened to it the whole way through.
Once we were sure we were happy with it, we saved our work and named it "Mr. Usher Monkey", which is the name of our team.