Today we’re celebrating the start of Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. You might have noticed that Central Station’s Bulletin page has been transformed – today it’s filled with EIFF related blogs, events, opportunities and items we’ve spotted from the web. The festival will launch tonight with a screening of Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist and over the next ten days will pack in hundreds of films and events.

You might already have spotted our two roaming reporters benwerd and TaxidermyMouse who will be capturing the spirit of the festival through words, images and sound. Check out Ben’s first festival blog to get a flavour of what’s to come.

We also will be hosting a very special event – the culmination of our Roderick Buchanan soundtrack project. After a call out to Central Station members we shortlisted a group of composers to work with Roddy to create the soundtrack to two of his short films. Andy Sim and his group Fear Wasabi were the eventual winners and the final collaborative films have just been finished and will be screened this Sunday at 9pm. The event is called Sound:Image:Art – it’s free but you need to reserve a ticket through the EIFF box office. We’ll see you there! And you can read about the last few weeks of the project in producer Gaia’s blog.

If you’re in Scotland and looking to explore the festival my Editor picks are a good place to start – I’ve chosen a selection of events and films which embrace disciplines incorporating film, art, sound and animation. From the best of local short-filmmaking to the first audio horror film the selection is eclectic to say the least. Embrace it and let us know what you think.

And finally for those interested in film more generally why not browse the blogs from Moving Image Month – they’ll give you a multi-faceted picture of everything that comes under that wide-ranging banner.

Right, now I’m off to dig out a posh frock for tonight’s Opening Gala… make sure you check back tomorrow for the verdict on the event.

There has been a rise in the amount of blogging by the other members of Fear Wasabi recently, which I’ve been glad of.  In the earlier phases of the project I worried that I was failing to properly represent them, being as we were submitting collectively and so on through my individual profile.  Writing in the 1st person can have an ego-trip effect on me, I bet this turns into a philosophical ramble of some sort…

Anyway, following our now-customary travel disaster, yesterday we were back at Savalas “plush is not the word” Studios, situated in a renovated section of the old Govan Town Hall, which we found still has it’s main hall area hidden away, in all it’s grandeur.  While part of the team played with recording the reverb in there (leaping around in the dark, frightening the janitors), the others got on with some recording and arranging in-studio.

Fear Wasabi has been referring to Giles as our “5th Horseman”.  At one point yesterday while he was out, we de-tuned a violin (a hammer would have been a more subtle method to how we achieved this) and bowed some double-stop harmonics, creating a frankly bizarre noise.  That kind of stunt would have swiftly lead to our expulsion from any orchestra in the land, but upon his return, Giles simply grinned and said “cool sound”.

Apart from being tremendously encouraging and understanding, Giles has been manning the mixing-desks for us, and until we met Iain he was the fastest man we’d ever seen at the controls of Pro-Tools.  There were one or two moments of revelation for us in there, first hearing our rough sketches played through the Dolby system in the studio, and then hearing the difference once Iain had a chance to do a quick (really quick) 5.1 mix and give the various sounds some space…completely different listening experience.  The skills these guys bring to the table totally transform whats being produced.

Yesterday afternoon also brought an always-welcome opportunity to talk with Roddy and Gaia about the ideas and sounds we have been toying with.  Different perspectives and opinions are, to my mind, essential in the creation of work that is interesting and satisfying not only to those making it, but objectively too.  I can’t help but feel privileged to have been able to work with such a group of diverse talent as this.

Enough talking about working, best go get on with some!

Andy (Fear Wasabi)

PS. Told you I’d ramble.

The Business End

The Fear Wasabi bandwagon rattled down from it’s HQ in Dundee to Glasgow yesterday for a very pleasant afternoon chatting with Gaia and Giles at Savalas.  The discussion occasionally touched on our “working dynamic”, which now needs to expand a bit given the deadlines and so on, as well as the need to work quite closely with Giles.  My effort at describing our working practise as Fear Wasabi (which, prior to this project was more a semi-improvised live-performance creature rather than a recording one) was that we had “several long discussions before sitting down to record over the space of an evening”, which probably wasn’t terribly enlightening.  I think it’d be fair to say that what we try to focus on is the root concept that we want to convey, and that how we go about making actual sounds follows that.  Sometimes specific ways of conveying an idea will come to us, but often we work just by trying things and seeing how the others react.  Each member of the group plays some sort of instrument, for example on our Traffic interpretation we really liked the video’s simple energy, so you can hear me strumming away at a violin, Gomango playing a harmonium and rattling some fruit-shakers, In/visigen bowing some violin through a guitar effects-pedal and Phipsim playing his beloved Korg x-50 and MicroKorg…all of us huddled around a small microphone.
Anyway, a few hundred words later I feel I’m no closer to really pinning down how exactly we make these noises, hopefully through the mysteries of the internet this will have made some sense to someone somewhere…
Upon it’s return to HQ, Fear Wasabi is pleased to report that it enjoyed some excellent fish and chips from The Silvery Tay (yes, in Newport rather than Dundee.  If ever a city was in real need of a good chipper, it’s Dundee) and sat on the roof of a castle watching the sun go down.

Congratulations to Andy Sim for winning the Roderick Buchanan Soundtrack
competition.  Central Station, Savalas and Roderick Buchanan are very happy to
announce the winner and we are really looking forward to working with Andy
at Savalas Studios over the next few weeks to develop his ideas and realize
an amazing soundtrack for Roderick Buchanan’s new Films ‘Lament’ and
‘Tattoo’.  Below is the selection process that led to our decision.

The shortlist

We managed to shortlist 6 composers out of over 50 entries which took a bit
of doing and actually was a pretty unique experience for myself and Roddy
and Paul.  Generally the standard was pretty high with some people obviously
putting a lot of time and effort into scoring the two very different films,
‘traffic’ and ‘out’.  We always aimed for the results of this process to be
very much part of the overall body of work.  The results were a real insight
into how sound can effect the appreciation and meaning of the films.
Amongst the myriad of entries varying from the movie soundtrack to sound
design to a more esoteric sound art/Musique concrete approaches, there were
a number of stand out scores.  What seemed to work best was not trying to
make a movie soundtrack but something more sympathetic to the films which
were made without a soundtrack in mind.

Daniel Paddens soundtrack for ‘Traffic’ worked beautifully in capturing and
delineating the constant variation of scenes whilst keeping a coherent
creative flow to the piece.  His use of juxtaposing music and found sound
captured the nostalgic ‘found’ nature of the piece.  We were impressed with
Lu Sisi’s beat driven cut up track and the fact that he edited the pictures
which then fitted the music showed a boldness and presence of mind and
captured the illusive equal partnership between picture and sound.
Nils Meisel’s soundtrack to ‘Out’ brought a smile to our face.  Its uniqueness
and bold approach revealed a strong underlying creative process.
Jonnie Commons electronic rendition for ‘traffic’ was very effective giving a real
sense of movement and momentum.  It had an organic nature sympathetic to the
film.  The use of scribbling effects also showed this originality and a real
openness to what a soundtrack could be beyond the stereotypes.
Martin Rebelski’s lovely piece for Traffic was really evocative and complimented
the images in a really hypnotic way.

Andy Sim’s score to traffic had a really quirky musicality and we like his
thought process.  The slightly folksy sound worked well and we thought there
is more than meets the eye (ear) from this guy.

Selecting the winner

So to the finals.  On April 9th Roddy presented 4 outlines.  All of which
were potentially very interesting but not all of them suited the kind of
budgets and timescales we are on.  The 2 rejected ideas were inspired by the
imminent world cup in south Africa but would involve a lot of field work
which was just not practical – we will just have wait a few years for these.
The 2 selected ideas, ‘Paddy’s Lament’, a juxtaposition of a 19th century tale with
a 21st century youtube movie exploring the ‘us and them’ paradox and
‘Tattoo’, part of Roddy’s ongoing work with Parkhead Republican Flute Band,
an animated presentation of body imagery.  These  were formed in light of
the soundtracks we had been hearing. Roddy makes films without a
‘soundtrack’ or at the very least a simple location sound so the requirement
of a soundtrack and the specific musical ideas flying around his head after
listening to 53 pieces of music for his other films helped form his ideas
for the films he devised.  To me this is important as it follows the agenda
of this project that the sound and music influence each other as opposed to
simply adding sound to a film. The challenge for Roddy is his self confessed
unfamiliarity with the language of film music and his dislike for the overly
dramatic preferring creative expression to be a distillation of reality.
The ideas presented for the final selection were generally excellent.  Time
was tight  for the composers and for Roddy, Gaia and myself to select the
finalist. There were 2 very strong contenders for the gig but practicalities
meant there could only be one winner.

Sadly Daniel Padden and Lu Sisi had  to pull out which left us 4 contenders
to choose from.

We all felt that the winner, Andy Sim’s score for tattoo was very strong,
complimenting the work very well and employing a well thought out creative
process.  With a very effective use of sound design and music exploring
innocence of rivalry contrasting playground sounds with football cheers and
an underlying abstract musical texture.  This had a lot to say and
contributed to the images whilst standing up as a coherent piece.  There is
great possibility with this piece.  Andy’s Lament was a little more spare
and underdeveloped but the use of the latin dance clapping reference was a
great creative analogy and again showed real potential.

Martin Rebelski’s Score for Lament I felt worked really well and was a very
close runner up.  It had a very hypnotic use of fragments of ‘film music’
and nicely panned horse hooves.  Subtle but effective.  As the big drums and
innocent music box sample came in, it evoked something of the peculiar
juxtaposition between the relationship building and standing ground in the
situation and introduced the youtube movie really well.   The score for
Lament was also strong the violin bowing sound and guitar worked well in
creating a backdrop which introduced the drums which built really well
through the piece.  The music reminded me of Sumu Yakoto – no bad thing!

Jonnie Common’s soundtrack for Tattoo was also strong.  The flutes had a neat
connection with the subject but created an ‘other worldliness’. His blog
described using windup marching toys which sounded interesting. We were not
sure where the soundtrack was going with the cut up beats towards the end
however it sounded musically strong. His score for Lament was much more
sparse, it was an interesting perhaps a little too sparse.  He had some
strong concepts behind the work (using tape loops) which, I didn’t quite
come across in this rendition.  The creative thought processes were strong
and given some time some very interesting things could come out.

Nils Meisel’s Score for Tattoo’s was very different to the other entries
with a bold use of piano sound fragments.  As an improvising pianist this
was right up my street and was very captivating.  The introduction of sound
effects was interesting and obviously a lot of work had gone into this. The
end result sat firmly in the sound art domain which was not quite where
Roddy wanted to take the piece. In my opinion, a very strong piece. Nils
Lament was very evocative and sucked you in with a lovely piano arpeggio and
using real sounds to set the scene was a nice touch.  The sound didn’t
really evolve and as such lacked a certain dynamic we were looking for.
Having said that it was a great sounding score and the production values
were second to none. We were impressed with really all the work gone into
giving options of stereo and surround mixes.

Andy Sim (Fear Wasabi)