Hard to believe that I didn’t become Yorkshire’s answer to Steven Spielberg when you look at these 1965 production stills from our ambitious science fiction home movie Hostile Aliens. Thanks to Adobe Photoshop, I’ve been able to print this hopelessly badly developed negative for the first time. Richard Ryan’s stand-in dummy is about to be incinerated by the Alien’s heat ray. Alien played by my sister Linda in my dad’s oilskin and waders (plus papiere mache mask when the camera was rolling.
Linda also played the World Security observer responsible for monitoring outer space for alien invaders. In real life the emergency telephone put you through to the telephone exchange at the top end of Wensley Street.
For a stop action shot of the World Security armoured personnel carrier trundling towards the alien landing site, Lin pressed the cable release while I moved the model inch by inch across our garden rubbish heap.
My latest homemade birthday card is for my great nephew Zach. It celebrates the home movies that my brother, sister and I made in the days of Standard 8 cine. As you can see, Bill took the action roles, often at risk to life and limb, with my sister guest starring as the ‘Hostile Alien’, ‘The Thing’ and, no doubt hoping to break out of being typecast, a World Security agent scanning the skies for invaders from outer space.
Our friends were regularly in the cast, launching flying machines and hatching dastardly plots for world domination. Mostly we filmed in our garden; the rhubarb patch made a suitably lush jungle but for a more dramatic setting we headed for the local quarry.
But we did consider health and safety. I remember us discussing the possibility that our flying machine might overshoot and end up crashing down onto the railway line. In the event it plummeted vertically downwards when we launched it from the top of Horbury Quarry although I stood well back when filming, just in case.
I like a bit of challenge, so I’m composing my first movie score. It might be just a two-minute film of frost-covered plants in our back garden, but it’s taken me several hours at the keyboard and computer so far!
It was an article in the latest copy of iCreate magazine that got me started; they demonstrate how easy it is to drop your movie into Garageband, Apple’s music-creation software. I plugged in my midi-keyboard, set the film going and played the simplest of chords as carefully as I could.
Just how difficult can it be to compose a snippet of wintery background music?
You Know the Score
The curly-topped ‘7’ symbol represents a pause – musically a rest – of one crochet’s length. A crochet is a quarter note but the dot after it means that I paused for slightly longer.
You can watch the score appearing as you play, which is astonishing, but, as you’d expect with my shaky hands, it does end up looking rather messy, with my pauses there for all to see, marked with dots and squiggles. In the stave above, the hash mark reveals that I accidentally hit one of the black notes, F sharp (this is the lower, bass clef, normally played with the left hand).
On a Roll
This is where Garageband comes to the rescue: having mapped out a sketchy version of my idea on the keyboard, I can switch from the intimidatingly professional-looking Score view to what they call the Piano Roll. This gives a visual representation of the notes that I hit, which I’m much more at home with.
I can see where I’ve failed to hit all three notes of a chord simultaneously but it’s easy to click the offending note with a mouse and adjust its length, so that it’s perfectly synchronised. I don’t mind the playing being slightly ragged, but I definitely need to be more consistent in hitting the beat, which is indicated by the bolder vertical lines on the graph. I’ve got a lot of clicking and dragging to do to get this score into shape.
Back in Score view, can see that I’m clomping across from one bar to another, without any sense of the four-beats-to-a-bar rhythm that I’m supposedly playing in. I’m learning so much from the process.
