Rusty Ol’ Twinklebox

Some texture work on the music box cylinder as a screengrab: (click to enlarge)

This is how the rusty old fella is looking:

Finding Resonance

With Biff at his Darley Mills studio trying to find a resonating object to attach the music box to.

Biff has finished the melody and punched it into a strip of card ready for playing.

When playing the music box, the sound you achieve is dependant on the surface that you place it on. If you don’t attach it to anything it’s extremely quiet, whereas if you place it on a large table it becomes very loud. The quality of sound also changes depending on the material the object is made from and the space in which you play it. So we’re experimenting with some different objects to see what kinds of sounds we can achieve and what will be suitable for the requirements of the film.

Here are a couple of examples:

Music Box on Blackboard recorded by aaronbradbury and performed by Emphemetry

Music Box on Metal Bucket with Mic Inside recorded by aaronbradbury and performed by Emphemetry

Music Box inside Piano recorded by aaronbradbury and performed by Emphemetry

Whiskey Workshop

With a tightly packed suitcase me and Biff head to the Pixel-Lab HQ in Darley Abbey where Biffs recording studio is located. A longer than brief stop off in the Abbey to fuel our creative mind cogs, an informative taxi ride and several noticings later and we arrive at the Mill.

I’ve decided to use an early piano recording Biff did for the project and cut a simple introductory edit for Twinklebox. Biff explains that the piece was recorded at the wrong speed and that it’s in a different key to what he had originally wrote it and how this might complicate writing a complimentary part on the music box. He then discovers that the music box only has white notes, with no flats, and this might prove awkward to write with due to the original piano chords being in B flat. Nevertheless, we both like the original recording of the piano and Biffs decides that with a little musical magicery he can write something to work with it.

Biffs explanation:

For the melody to be in tune with the piano it has to be in B flat, but the music box only plays white notes, so in order to make it possible for the box to play it, I’ve transposed it up to E. Now the only problem is that the music box is pitched at concert A flat.

Anyway, we watched a couple of reference videos and worked out an appropriate tempo the tune must be to achieve a sense that the tune is in fact being played by the music box and not just part of an accompanying track. Due to Twinklebox’s music cylinder being his driving wheel, his speed of motion is directly linked to the tempo of his music. If the tempo is too slow he will literally look motionless, if he moves too fast the melody of his tune would be lost completely. There’s a certain amount of flexibility between these values before the connection between the music box and the music is lost.

Colours of Autumn

I imagine this is what Autumn looks like in the world of Mr Toots.

Music Box Concept Render

Well… This is another old one… A low-res render test with some improved modeling and texturing… It’s a bit sketchy… The rear base of the model is floating and the music cylinder moves around far too much. It’s mainly just to get a feel for the character within an environment. It will hopefully throw up some ideas visually as well as musically. The kinds of sounds the character can produce might be dependent on the way he moves or vice-versa.

The music is a very short section from a larger sequence of chord ideas from Biff. It’s not yet supposed to be coming from the music box… it’s more of a development of ideas.

Music Box Character Motion Tests

It was a while ago that I created these tests… They were primarily to examine the amount of character achieveable from different structural designs of the music boxes. I think my conclusion was that they all had a uniquely interesting character, some quite funny, some quite sad. The music is also from an early point in the development process… Biff made several chord sequences and melodies from the videos I gave him and this one seems to fit nicely with this compilation of clips.

Music Box Character Designs

Here are some of the character designs for the twinklebox project. They’re old but fun.