I chose “Howl’s Moving Castle” (Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004). It had dialog, which would be a challenge, and I thought it would be interesting to do an orchestral piece.
Two sections that stood out to me. When Sophie was about to crash into the castle, and when everyone is sleeping. I spotted these in Logic to set the tempo of the piece. Spotting is the process of breaking the piece up into different emotional states.
I chose to create a leitmotif for the main characters. I did this for contrast between when the main characters are interacting and when we have a different emotional cue.
For the crash, I wanted it to sound hopeful at the beginning, and then create a sense of impending doom as she realises that she cannot land. Using Pantriadic Chromaticism (Lehman, 2018) and shortening note lengths as we begin to crash, I created drama by moving outside of the diatonic. This resolves into a variation of the diatonic theme to let the audience know that no one was hurt.
There were a few challenges while I was working. One was working with the tempo changes created when spotting. It became an issue as I created a few too many points. This created periods of pronounced changes in the tempo. To make these tempo changes less obvious, I wrote in a way that a single instrument could play over the end of one tempo and into another to make them less obvious.
I found Pantriadic Chromaticism has helped me to break the structures that I have relied upon and concentrate on the feeling that I’m trying to elicit. By not relying so much on what key I’m in and the chords in that scale, I can concentrate on the emotional tone that I’m after.
References:
Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Directed by Hayao Miyazaki [Feature film]. Tokyo, Japan: Studio Ghibli.Lehman, F. (2018)
Lehman, F. (2018) ‘Pantriadic Chromaticism’, in Hollywood harmony: Musical wonder and the sound of Cinema. New York, NY, NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 66–69.