Composers get to work on projects of all kinds - big and small; live and animated; horror and humorous. We usually show up right at the end of the production when everything is wrapped, locked, and ready for the final ingredient. But this composing job for John August was a chance to jump into a project in the first stages. This was a chance to work on an animatic!
What are animatics?
Animatics are a kind of pre-visualization for complicated sequences in a film. An animatic might stand in for a car chase, an alien attack, or any kind of massive visual effect where all the crew needs to be on the same page. Watching an animatic, which is a very rough animation of the sequence, can help people understand what the final product will look like.
But animatics can also act as one of the first steps toward making an animated film. And that's what this project is. Sticks is an animatic for a future animated short film. In this short, a wooden robot is brought to life by his magical master. Soon "Sticks" is working around his master's camp, tidying up, cooking, and fetching water. But when his master attempts a dangerous spell and is left paralyzed and floating in midair, Sticks must embark on a perilous journey far away from the camp he knows as home.
The world of Sticks is one of jungles and ancient ruins - a kind of alternate Africa where magical recluses live in the forest and perform mysterious rituals involving comets and levitation. For this project I wrote the score and provided some basic sound design to flesh out the world.
Effects like babbling brooks, chirping birds, and crackling campfires eventually give way to exploding shell bombs, growling hyenas, and the drip, drip, drip of a mysterious cave.
Audio and Video
Musically, we wanted to utilize African instruments without being overly specific, and so a blend of Western and African music was decided upon.
You can hear my score for Sticks here.
And you can watch an excerpt of the animatic here.
I hope you enjoy the work I did with sound and music to turn this beautiful animatic into a lived-in world.