Other stuff to tell you

Remember the MapMaking project? The collaboration with students from the Royal College of Art, a multimedia concert focusing on Equator countries and climate change? Well, it isn't over yet. The performance will be in October and we have to have the final drafts of the films and the music done by the 1st of October as well as the titles for the pieces and little blurbs about them for the program.

Kuku, my partner, and I haven't seen each other since late June and I was having trouble getting a hold of her so was getting nervous about the whole thing. Fortunately we managed to meet up today- in the British Library no less! It totally didn't occur to me until today that the British Library is a brilliant place to study. I mean, I guess that is sort of a "no, duh" statement, but still. It hadn't occurred to me.

Kuku has completely changed the film. Again. And while I agree with her that it hangs together as a narrative better now, it also means that I need to completely change the feeling and tone of the music. Before the film had a lot of color and charming hand drawn characters that were cute, if a little confusing. Now it is full of 3D paper characters filmed in black and white... I can't have such stark music with a stark film. So I need to sit at a piano and figure something out. Which is actually kind of exciting, if daunting. Quick! Write something in a weekend!

Remember all those 3 session school workshops I was doing in July? They're back! Today I helped out Juliet and Jo at Shapla Primary school. Our song is about the rain forest and I wrote the cheeriest tune ever to these lyrics that the kids wrote last week:

People are cuttin' down trees, Animals are losin' their homes.
Lonely and lost with no food, will they survive or die?


It is a really inappropriately jaunty tune.

I kind of love it.


Fortunately the kids are less cheesy than I am and when they made up the tune for the last line they came up with something *much* classier than I did. I kept wanting to either soar up to a high note on "die" or, alternatively, stage whisper it... In spite of the kids classing it up, Juliet is still planning on making them step from side to side and/or shrug their shoulders in time to the beat.