Metropolis (1927) Soundtrack

Let's make a 'starting limit' with 20 participants, because if we end up recruiting 40 people then the fun will wear off quickly. So there's 5 to go - so far.

EDIT: Or perhaps this is a bad idea... Wow, I've already lost track of this :)

i'm in

the whole thread is tl;dr

may someone sum me up what it is about?

just to drop the note, peppermills recording just sent me a message of interest into this project! ... whatever you make of your choices... i hope it turnes out good! :)

PS @ Rook: i'm not inviting rooks. lol. for example look this compilation http://www.archive.org/details/kreislaufextra002 ... there's at least a few non watmmers there that would be a great addition to whatever we do. if they are interested.

  Brian Tregaskin said:

i'm in

 

the whole thread is tl;dr

 

may someone sum me up what it is about?

Soundtrack to Metropolis.

Scenes assigned randomly.

You get the names of the people doing the scenes ahead of you and behind you so you may converse and swap ideas if you so choose.

Make musics.

Send musics in.

Edit movie.

The question on the table now is, should we cap it at 20, have more than twenty and do some sort of competition/vote with the duplicates, or allow/recruit around forty to do two versions?

Personally, I am all for taking our time with this and doing two versions if there is enough interest. That might be a lot to expect though. I just don't want to see some people who are good music makers get excluded just because they maybe haven't read the thread yet.

YES

i say we cap it at twentyfourange

im in

  essines said:

YES

do you music?

iMUSIC©

  Rook said:

  Max said:

  mrx said:

I thought that "WATMM's Version" would imply that this project would involve watmm members (i.e. not people who haven't registered already). Not that it matters, but maybe wait a little before inviting your friends. Also, this thread should be moved to EKT

 

 

i'm out - if you put it that way. altogether.

 

EKT. WATMM.... dude... it's an internet board. do you have a list of people who are allowed to post here ? we are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.

 

hopefully your dreams include the meeting of new people. new choices. different ways. this is not the chicago house scene.

 

I understand what mrx is saying. It is kind of cool to have people who we "know" doing the music for the movie, and it would be strange if a whole bunch of outsiders came, never posted, and just submitted their tracks and left. On the other hand, it is always a good idea to bring new people to the board, and I really have no problem with n00bs submitting tracks. Plus, the more interest their is, the more versions we can make, which means fewer people will be left out/weeded out through competition.

It's not only that really, I was also trying to suggest is that since that there are many musicians on this forum (http://forum.watmm.com/index.php?showforum=3), then there really isn't any need to get outsiders in on this project.

edit: is metropolis in the public domain? which version of this film will be used?

i'll do it if it's still open

  mrx said:

edit: is metropolis in the public domain? which version of this film will be used?

I have the Kino version, which I believe is the newest and most complete version available, at least in the US. And Squee has the 75th anniversary edition which I assume is the same thing. The film's copyright was restored (hence the new versions) so it is no longer in public domain. We will upload any scenes to I guess either youtube or google video for those who don't have access to the film.

This sounds fascinating. Count me in please, if theres still less than the 20 members your starting off with.

reading through the ideas, my feelings on this are that the absolute ideal way to work on this, is 20-25 people with 4-6 minutes each, with plenty of collaborations between the different composers to ensure the whole thing has a smooth and proffessional feel.

if you wanted to pick melodic themes to keep certain things running through similar, you could easily just pinch one of Messiaen's themes, they are not highly catchy recognisable themes, most of them are pretty fookin dark, and most of them are a simple two bar, single note conjuct melody which leaves plenty of scope for variation.

in fact if you gave 20 of us a messiaen tune such as you would probably find that not a single piece actually sounded anything like each other.

you could of course, connect it by modulation. how many people on here often modulate within a single track? you could work out some kind of vast tonal or serialistic key sequence and run it throughout the movie.

anyway i am definetely in.

btw running it as a competition is a dire idea.

I'm totally into this idea would love to participate cheers

nice. I think we may be at about 19 people now, once Squee updates the list.

I'm not sure if I like the idea of choosing one melodic theme, or borrowing another composer's theme. I think the best way is to just (after the scenes are assigned) post a list of who is doing what scene, so you may collaborate if you choose. For example, if I get a scene near the end with Maria, I might want to contact someone who has Maria in an early scene in the movie. This way, if it is reasonable, we could try to quote a character theme. That would be really ideal though. Realistically, it will be difficult if not impossible to really create a completely cohesive sounding soundtrack without everyone in a room for a month as I think Idiron stated earlier.

you could consider this thread a room.

i think that as long as everybody involved still finds them motivated and excited by the project after 6 months work on it, theres a good chance of creating a genuine masterpiece.

i havent even seen the film and i think this premise kicks flim out of dsc.

Okay, we've got 21 participants so far. I don't know if I should just keep adding people to the list, because we could make two versions of the film, like Rook said, if we get enough participants.

btw metropolis is a public domain film isn't it ?

does that mean we could even release a dvd if we wanted too?

public domain year is 1927, so i dont know.

another thing

here i can see that there is different version of the movie

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A322372

which version are you going to use

edit:

in the internet archive they have this one

The version I've got is 118 minutes, and I believe it's practically the same one Rook has

The version I have is 124 minutes. The original was over 200 minutes long, but most of the film is lost. Plus, the film would have been shown at a much slower speed.

But yea, the copyright was definitely renewed, at least in America, I think.

According to Wikipedia it was renewed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_%28film%29

Btw, Jedy. That link has a comment on the bottom enquiring (British spelling lol) about the end of the movie. So I assume that version is incomplete.

I think we should definitely cap at least one version of the soundtrack at twenty people. Otherwise, we are looking at less than six minutes per person. Besides, when we actually edit down the movie into twenty parts, it might not work well split into twenty parts. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. For this reason, I think we should keep sign ups open for maybe a week so as many people can join as they want. If we get enough, we could potentially make two versions. Even if we got thirty people, we could do the first fifteen (already signed up) and the second fifteen. So let's keep sign ups open for a while longer until we can get a definite count on interest, and make a decision from there. I mean, this thread has only been up for one day and we have 21 people interested. I am sure some people who might be interested have either not been on Watmm or just haven't seen the thread yet.

Also, I was thinking about this in the shower, what should we do about credits? I am sure someone on here is a graphic designer. We could make our own opening credits and assign someone (randomly of course) to do the "overture" over the opening credits.

i want to start right now.

  pcock said:

i want to start right now.

Just returned a PM from Squee. We are going to over the next couple days attempt to cut the movie down into 20 manageable scenes. After that, I'll just assign everyone a number and draw them at random on the computer to assign scenes.