Final Assessment: 'Gimme Shelter' Live Performance

I feel that our final assessed performance for the 'Gimme Shelter' trailer went quite well, as no one messed up, and everyone was in time with one another, and it was a great improvement from our previous performance. I started off playing the ostinato in the beginning, and I kept it in time, making sure that it was easy for anyone to get back in time with it even if they sped up. Seema and Almira played their own melodies quite well, and there were many parts when we played arpeggios, meaning we were putting everything we learnt in our work. I think that our instrumentation was quite good, as none of the instruments quite sounded like another - Almira played the piano, Seema played the xylophone and the bass drum to provide a beat for piece where it required it, and I played the keyboard with it on the Style: #086 setting which provided a nice synthesizer kind of effect to the music. I think that one thing that made our group's trailer quite creative was the fact that we used Marissa's voice in our piece for singing rather than just speaking or voiceover, and actually gave her a melody to sing that fitted in with the trailer and the rest of the music quite well. One of the strong points in our performance was the way we used crescendos toward the middle to build up to a thicker texture where the visuals get quite intense. 'Gimme Shelter' is a story where a young girl is left homeless after her mother is taken away from her, and she is left to live with her (until recently) absentee father, who is quite rich. After living quite poorly for most of her life, she doesn't fit into this new environment, and all the hate for her father, rage and sorrow from being separated fro her mother builds up, making her seem a little crazy on the outside. Our group portrayed this by going a little quieter here, allowing the tension to build up on the screen while Marissa vocalized a few words that went along with the situation: I'm going crazy; Just trying to find my home; Someone help me; NOW. When the girl on screen finally runs away from home, all of the instruments return back playing loudly at around a mezzoforte level of dynamics, showing all the intenseness of the scene, and when it ends with a car crash, we all go quieter again. I think that another strong point in our performance is the ending, where quite a meaningful message is played on the screen, after the protagonist finally finds her home, a place where she is welcomed and is happy, and this is where all of us go silent except for Almira who plays a few slow arpeggios and ends by playing a high-pitched chord to show 'the happy ending'. A few things that also made our music sound better was the reverb effect set on the amplifier for Marissa's voice, making it echo and sound even slightly angelic at places, along with the xylophone which was also hooked up to the same amp, and this made it sound less sharp than xylophone usually do and a lot more soft and echo-ey. Although, this proved as a slight problem when I used the video we recorded of it and went back to iMovie to put the audio on top of the actual 'Gimme Shelter' trailer - the device we used to record the performance didn't pick up the sound well, as the speakers made it too loud on the Mac, making it sound like our music was blaring in places that sounded quite nice in real life. Another small mistake we made was that we forgot to turn off the metronome that we were using on the piano when performing, so that it was just constantly there in the background, making it sound like we were actually out of time whenever there was an accelerando in our piece to match the intenseness of the scene we were playing it to. Since there were a few technical problems with the trailer during our final performance, we had to play without it, meaning that when I put it on top of the trailer, it was slightly sped up, and it was hard to match the audio to the video. Overall though, I think that we did quite a good job, and some of the improvements that we could make next time are to also add a few sound effects from online and play them when needed during the performance, for example we could've played a car crash sound effect when a car crash happened onscreen. Another thing to consider next time would be to add some normal speech when characters are speaking during the trailer as well, to improve the authenticity of the film music we composed.