How I Did It
April's Eskimo Escapadeby Beluga Ten
Samples are used in:
Tools I Used
Sonar
Goldwave
VLC Media Player
Studiologic SL-990 (MIDI master)
Yamaha V50 (synth)
Edirol Sound Canvas VST (soft synth)
Behringer BCF-2000 (control surface)
Tapco 6306 (analogue mixer)
Tea
Samples I Used
April by Quarkstar (CC-BY-NC)
Electro Loops, Breaks and Bridges by Quarkstar (CC-BY-NC)
"Eskimos: Winter in Western Alaska" (1950), Prod: Frederick Machetanz (CC-0)
Original Samples
There are several original musical parts that I composed. As well as creating an accompaniment to give a different feel to the loops, this also allowed me to create a bridge, and a transitiion into the finale (which again, is the finale from "April"). The original finale has a very prominent reed instrument in it (sounds like a sampled oboe), and it would sound very odd if this was the only time it popped up. So I needed a very similar sound, which I created by layering an oboe preset from a vintage synth on top of a sax preset from a modern software synth, and adding some FX.
Process
This was a project where I had the spoken audio files already, which were waiting for a suitable project. While working on the Secret Mixter project, I listened to some of Quarkstar's samples, and realised the tremolos would sound great as a shivery, cold setting for the Eskimo subject matter I already had.
In terms of extracting the original audio from the film, I downloaded the Ogg Video file from archive.org, which seemed to be the best available format for audio quality, without resorting to a massive MPEG2 file. I ran the file through VLC Player to convert it to a WAV file, then used Goldwave to filter out background hiss, and chop up the audio into individual files that could be placed at cue points in the music.
The main musical loops are from the intro to "April" by Quarkstar. I created a couple of variations to add interest at key points, such as the chorus.
The shivery sounds in the bridge are from Quarkstar's Electro Loops pack. I used Goldwave to dynamically filter out the low and mid frequencies in the sample, as they were in the wrong key for this project and didn't really fit anyway. This left the white noise on it's own to do it's shivery thing.
Other Notes
When sampling audio from a film or a long spoken word file, I find it helps if you play the file several times and transcribe the words and the time that they appear in the film. Not everything jumps out at you at first, but if you have most of the words written down, you can extract more of them later if you need to.
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