Focus on Piotr Kamler

Focus on Piotr Kamler

Piotr Kamler, born in Warsaw, Poland in 1936, made a number of delightful animations which create fantastic worlds. His works include  L’Araignéléphant (1968), Délicieuse catastrophe (1970), La Planete Verte (1966), Cœur de secours(1973), Le Labyrinthe(1969), and Chronopolis.(1977-1982). He studied Fine Arts in Paris in 1959 and worked with a number of Musique Concrete composers such as Bernard Parmegiani, Iannis Xenakis, François Bayle and Ivo Malec.

François Bayle, born in Madagascar, composed over 100 compositions, his style was musique concrete, electronic art music. He studied in the 1950s with Messiaen, Schaeffer and Stockhausen and contributed widely to the culture of experimental music by arranging concerts, radio broadcasts, seminars and events in France. He held the position of head of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) which he held until 1997. He then opened his own Studio, Studio Magison.

There's a great interview with Bayle in 2009, from the Computer Music Journal, talking about enjoying messing with the stereo placement of sounds, using many loudspeakers to challenge the listener with their ideas of space. He looks at acousmatic music and graphic representation of sounds, amongst other topics.

http://tekstytrzecie.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/interview-with-francois-bayle.pdf

“In acousmatic music, one may recognize the sound sources, but one also notices that they are out of their usual context. In the acousmatic approach, the listener is expected to reconstruct an explanation for a series of sound events, even if this explanation is provisional. Like reading a detective story, one invents a scenario to find the chain of causality that explains the situation.” Bayle

THE HEART, or Coeur de Secours
9 min 1973

A Piotr Kamler film
Music: François Bayle

The use of unusual sounds, placed carefully in the stereo field with space to hear each sound encourages a curiosity from the listener. I believe that this approach creates an interesting conversation with the visual in animation, allowing the viewer to make their own sense of the piece. In The Heart, the sounds are sparce and textured, related to the image but not directly echoing the sound effects of the objects or actions in the film. The opening shot, with the man on a bike rocking back and forth, then cycling forwards, uses sounds that reflect the slowness of the movement, the mechanical feel, perhaps the squeaking of the wheels. There is a tonal line, mostly static, like a clarinet or bassoon, with percussive clicks and rumbles. This contrasts the high flute-like notes accompanying the steps of the man following the woman in the next scene. The pair of men playing chess have thinking music, random slow notes of wide intervals, intellectual and thoughtful. The sounds throughout are sparce and never dominate the visual with overexaggerated emotion or full frequency washes of sound. The lack of dialogue or narrative also allows the sounds to exist without becoming less important than the narrative.

Compare this film to La Planete Verte, also by Piotr Kamler. The soundscape has some similarities, despite being by Ivo Malec (who incidentally also was involved in the GRM and worked with Schaeffer). The experience of watching the film is very different because of the narrative. Immediately the soundscape is pushed into the background, the story taking a dominant position. La Planete Verte is also more classical, with gestures from the orchestra which are recognisable instruments and sounds, less the electronic sound of Bayle. The sounds are more prescriptive in relation to the visual, that is to say that they match the visual more directly than Bayles, they are less abstract and dreamy.

Another particularly interesting film by Kamler is Le Labyrinthe, the sound done by Bernard Parmigiani. 

 It opens with the sound of Tibetan Monks doing throat singing (or at least extremely low voices), combined with dissonant electronic tones which pulse in and out. A babble of voices enters as different faces are gradually seen on the same head silhouette shape. The voices stop, and the tone returns, pulsing in intensity as though alive. Later we hear the voices entering again at intervals throughout the piece, like voices in your head, or different personalities within one person.

Sound effects like footsteps reinforce the nightmare like quality of this film, but the soundtrack does not directly follow the visuals in a prescriptive manner. It is open enough to encourage curiosity, and sparce enough to hear individual sounds and textures, for example around 2.43 where electronic sounds are like a jungle at night, where the visual texture is like the sihouette of trees and perhaps veils of leaves. Creatures hang and move like bats in defined spaces in the frame. But the sounds are electronic, familiar and unfamiliar, with a gesture towards a sound effect but mysterious. A shimmering tone accompanies a solitary man who walks through the landscape.

The soundtrack builds up tension as the man becomes more agitated and frantic, reaching a climax at 12.20 with sharp string staccato jabs as the man moves, stops, then moves in a stuttering repeated rhythmic pattern, dissonant and tense. The high frequencies are taken out gradually as the man falls, with still stuttering movements, then the many faces projected onto the single head move towards the viewer again with two dissonant tones which are held through changes in the visual scene. The note remains while we see a square tunnel with a face gradually lit up, too large for the head silhouette surrounding it, then a tiny man walks across the head. The music fades and the film ends.

The sound track makes the film extremely intense and powerful. It evokes a sense of madness and being trapped in your head, your mind. Yet it allows enough room for individual interpretation, silences and sparce sounds, and enough room to ask questions about the visuals. The conversation between the visuals and the sound is fascinating, and quite even in terms of power with neither dominating over the other.  

NIght Fishing with Cormorants by Betsy Kopmar

Night Fishing with Cormorants
by Betsy Kopmar
Sound by The Headroom Project- Winter Skies from Dominatus Illuminato Mea

Night Fishing with Cormorants echoes the japanise sumi and ink drawing styles, while retaining a modern feel with colored overlays of red, and a soundtrack that links past and future in its tone.
The film is abstract with a sense of contrast between the black ink and the white background, with red highlights adding a sense of another layer, depth and an extra dimension of colour to the piece. The blurred edges and gentle movement add to the sense of a picture come to life, as lines shift and join together, only to separate into a lined texture that moves like smoke or creates a new plane in space.


Delightfully spacious and open, this soundtrack suits the animation well.  With low tones and high tones easily distinguishable, there is a feeling of sky and room to fly.  The combination of acoustic and electronic instruments blends well, and reflects the spontaneity and rawness of the animation, with added elements of more controlled and technological structures such as the red spiral seen near the start.
The voice and string parts add a classical feel, grounding the animation in an old worldly spirituality, and the reverb adds again a sense of room to move and space to the piece.
Around half-way through the piece, hand percussion comes in, lifting the energetic level higher, while still retaining the long string notes which keep a sense of calm and peace.
Around the 3:30 mark, a lovely sound effect is heard which recalls the sound of feathers or wings, heard over long gentle string synth tones.  The sounds pan across the stereo field from right to left and back.  The ending is particularly effective in portraying the sense of birds flying across the sky.

Metachaos by Alessandro Bavari

Metachaos
by Alessandro Bavari
Sound by  Jeff Ensign, aka Evolution Noise Slave

A powerful film depicting the darker side of human nature in an abstract style, Metachaos uses a masterful soundtrack to highlight the visuals.   Opening with a metalic crackle not unlike keys opening a door into a different reality, the sound then rumbles, with long smooth tones and voice tones matching the white blocky machine structure as we move into it.  White human figures float in this place.  This contrasts with the sound accompanying the earthy dusty soil and organic figures, a crackly crunching sound, with constant wind blowing across the plain.
At around 1:55 there is an explosion, leading to a moment of intense stillness and rumbling, before the driving rhythm at 2:30 starts.  This matches the black spikey moving creature which is destroying all it touches.
Moments of intense stillness contrast with the agitation of the highly energetic rhythm, these seconds of peace are like the eye of the storm, a pregnant pause before the chaos erupts once more.
At 5:00 the wind blows, rumbling is heard, and the sound of stone on stone moving, crunching together, bodies moving and rattling before the 5:30 return of the rhythmic beat, low pulsing this time with higher wavering tones.  The layers gradually build up in sound and intensity.  At 6:30 there is the sound of screaming then quiet at 6:34.  The rhythm returns, but quiet at 6:45 with a rumble and high frequency, then the rhythm comes back relentlessly. The screaming returns with greater intensity at 7:00 leading to a climactic point in the visuals and the sound around 7:30.   At 7:44 there is an explosion, falling back to the wind and the sea as the film ends.

One element I find particularly interesting in this soundtrack is the textures which convey the contrasting environments and give a sense of physically being there, the crunching, the wind blowing, the sound of stone moving, the screams and screeches.
The way the energy is organised is skillful, in the sense of pulling back from the relentless rhythm with bars of silence, to enhance the energy when it returns, and the build-up which still allows for a climax at the end, despite keeping a sense of intensity throughout.  The quieter parts allow us to hear the wind and the crackling, and reset our ears to hear anew the agitated rhythms and sounds of the faster sections.
The contrast between the sound of the white blocky structure with the gently floating figures and the sound of the chaotic outdoor primal energy is interesting.  It sets up tension between the two at the start, which is broken down by the three figures falling from the sky who break open the structure with lightning like roots which shoot from their hands.  The sound when the jagged roots appear is harsh and crackling like electricity sparking.

There are sections where there are lots of high frequency sounds such as the crackling or high synth notes, but interspersed with times where there are mostly low frequencies, such as the quiet sections or the rumbling after the explosions.  This gives the effect of your hearing being affected by a loud sound, like a kind of temporary deafness after an aural assault.  Despite the multilayered sounds and the intensity and energy, the listener never gets fatigued with the sound, as it shifts and keeps you always listening for where it is going.
The soundtrack, with the visuals, take you deeply into this intensely disturbing world where chaos drives forward with a relentless energy, destroying and mutating all in its path.

Sound and animation or why this blog exists

Water.  This photo I took at the Lachine Rapids, in Montreal.  I was swinging the camera through the air to try to echo the sense of movement and fluid energy of the waves of the river Saint Laurent in a still shot.  There is stillness and movement, lines soft  in the background, and also detailed lines in the foreground.  I like abstraction.  My style of animation often involves the abstract, hinting at meaning rather than shouting or deliniating a particular response.

As an animator, when I compose music for animations, I also choose to allow room to explore the visual, the movement without grounding it too much in cliche or traditional music and sound.   As an example, here is a short film I made in the winter in Montreal in 2010.  

Watch Out, You Might Fall   

The music is sparce and almost crunchy in texture.   Strangely enough I wrote the music in Australia, and called it Cicada, as it sounded dry and desert-like.   The crackling sticks reminded me of ice when I was in Canada.  The sounds reflected my sense of delight at the winter but with a dark edge which the forest in winter also holds for me, seen in the final visuals.  There may be a gargoyle.  And some sticks breaking, glasses ringing, chopsticks on speaker boxes, humming and more.

This blog exists to explore the conversation between animation and sound in animated films.  Each entry will look at one animated film and consider the impact of the sound and visual elements as they relate to each other, with a view to how sound designers create a whole world in animated films.  I am particularly fascinated by pushing the boundaries in experimental sound and animation, writing my own soundscapes and music, asking questions that free me to be more open and more creative in my work, and spreading the energy to other animators, sound designers and the community.