Blackbox Project #3 - Documentation 1

I had been thinking about my third project for most of
the semester, but I was not quite sure how I wanted to
show varied (orchestral, solo instrument, choral,
electronic; arousing, thoughtful, relaxing, sad) types of
classical music and simultaneously explore how a
segment of music from a film impacts the audience's
response to the complete visual and audible motion
picture. It was a study of a blackbox called the mind.

I decided to approach the project with these questions
in mind:
a. What is anticipated by the listener hearing only the
music in a dark theater?
b. Is that expectation validated or in conflict when the
video is added without dialogue or sound effects?
c. What changes in feeling occur when the dialogue
and effects are added?
d. Is the music in the background or foreground?

I selected 7 films (out of nearly 40 on my original list)
for this project. I purposefully chose older films, some
of which may be well known to film students, but
hopefully not to the class as a whole, to lessen the
chance of a listener recognizing the film from the
music, Apocalypse Now being the one exception. It is
shown in an Audio Production class as an example of
the sound production talent of Walter Murch.

My next challange was to find the DVDs of films not in
my collection. Older films are often not available at a
certain nationally known rental house. A couple of my
original choices were scrapped when I could not find a
copy even at a couple of the local video rental stores.

Clockwork Orange (William Tell), Raging Bull, and
Ordinary People have neither dialogue nor effects in
the portion the soundtrack I wanted to use. While this
voided my third question, I decided to use them
because of the relationship of the classical music and
the visuals.

I located the complete segment of music that I wanted
to use and ripped the video and audio using #1 DVD
Ripper. The result is an avi file which I loaded into
Adobe Premiere Pro. I trimmed the video and marked
the transition points (1 or 2, depending on whether
dialogue/effects were to be included).

Amadeus, Out of Africa, and Apocalypse Now all had
to be edited and mixed. I stripped the film audio into
Adobe Audition, and also extracted a track from the
soundtrack CD. In the multitrack window, I carefully
matched up both audio tracks so I could play both with
minimal phasing. Next, I zoomed in to line up the wave
forms exactly. I also had to remove digital artifacts