#1

The Disquiet Junto will host a special project soon, a non-weekly one, which will have a longer production period, roughly a month. We’ll be collectively scoring a silent film. If you’re interested in participating, you can sign up for information here:

It’s a Google form. If you don’t want to use the form, just shoot me an email at disquiet@gmail.com expressing your interest.

Thanks to @rprecht for having inspired this project with his proposal.

17 Likes
#2

Um. We may be doing two different films, as we now have 60 participants.

5 Likes
#3

Nice, I’m interested, signed in.

image

1 Like
#4

Excellent. Thanks very much. I love your work.

1 Like
#5

Within a few hours, over 90 potential participants have signed up. More to come, and more planning to come. This will be great fun, and it’s exciting to think there will be a Junto project the outcome of which will be a single thing (or several single things, which is to say several films) lots of people joined in on. Very new for this community, and very exciting.

8 Likes
#6

I wasn’t sure if you already had clear ideas on structuring the finished soundtrack and am curious about your approach here.

For example, how will transitions between folks work? Exquisite corpse style? Delay fade out the first person while fading in the next person is probably easiest.

I’m also thinking you could potentially structure this like some of the Junto projects. For each different scene in the movie there could be certain constraints that everyone assigned to that section will use. These could be specific samples, patterns or other unifying concept.

1 Like
#7

I was thinking about this too: how will they be made to interlock. I think communication and planning is good, but tricky to do when there are so many participants: you don’t want to get blocked by others. It might be interesting for each participant in one movie to post a single sentence describing their thinking on each section. This can be used (or not) as input for the creator.

Another thought was that each person’s assigned section overlaps by some fairly significant amount over the sections before and after; this would allow for whoever edits the final cut more leeway in having things align or transition more naturally.

1 Like
#8

Howdy. Still fine-tuning the plan. I want to keep it as simple as possible, so folks are free to take the time they have to make the recording they want to make. With over 100 people signed up, it’s clear we’ll be doing more than one movie, so we’ll learn from the first one, and potentially alter the rules for the subsequent ones in order to mix it up.

There may be some additional Junto-style constraints, like shared source material for certain characters (just one example).

Most likely we’ll keep it like this: You get a “begin” time code and an “close” time code for your segment of the overall film. Based on your artistic judgement, you can start before, or at, or after the “begin” time code and end before, or at, or after the “close” time code. If you overlap with the track before or after yours, we’ll cross-fade, based on the editor’s artistic judgment.

10 Likes
#9

Yes, keep it simple. Plenty of ways to solve problems during the edit!

3 Likes
#10

Sounds great, love scoring silent films. Scored a few 8mm films for a local film festival a few years back, had a blast!

Also - this just occurred to me. Are we allowed to do foley/sound fx, or are you wanting soundtrack only?

3 Likes
#11

For the time being, the plan is purely non-diegetic sound, so score only. However, that doesn’t mean the music can’t align with what’s happening on screen to the point where it has a foley-like quality.

1 Like
#12

Would it be ill-advised for a newbie with only a small amount of equipment to join this?

1 Like
#13

Good question. In general, the Junto is about putting doubt out of mind and just making something. You’ve helped me recognize it’s different when the pieces are more dependent on each other. These pieces will be produced not in four days, like the weekly Junto projects, but over the course of a month. You’ll have that time to try options, to run drafts by each other, and to seek out feedback and advice. We’ll be doing several of these movies, not just one, and we’ll be doing them not all at once but over time. More than 125 people have expressed interest. So just join in when you feel up to it. It’ll be fun.

3 Likes
#14

Wonderful idea! I took part in a live silent film scoring event at our local art house theater last year, and it was so much fun! Excited to see what films will be on the docket and how plans come together!

1 Like
#15

Very excited to take part in this. I have some ideas of how to go about it, but no experience, other than trying my hand at it with some short films from ubuweb, several years ago. Thank you for organising this!

1 Like
#16

And … we’ve got over 150 people signed up. There’s some logistics to attend to. Details to follow in the next couple days.

5 Likes
#17

I’m in, Marc! Sounds like a lot of fun and haven’t done something like this in a long while. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#18

Pleased to give this project a go despite some initial doubt in myself.

Something I read last night that I thought may be relevant to this project.

Knowing what key (scale) your neighboring fellow collaborator was using before your cue to begin.

3 Likes
#19

awesome! looking forward to see what comes out of this.

1 Like
#20

I just now included an update on the project (nothing momentous, just a status report) in the Disquiet Junto email list. If you didn’t get it, subscribe for future announcements at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto. I will likely create a separate list for the Junto Silent Film work. The status update itself is here: https://disquiet.com/2020/05/28/disquiet-junto-silent-film-project-update/.

3 Likes