The Making of Clip Joint

Clip Joint won a Silver Seal and Best Animation at Movie 2002
took third place in the animation category at the Czech ArsFilm arts festival 2002.
was part of UK's programme for the UNICA 2002 Festival
and was turned down by The Cannes Film Festival ...
Meet the stars | How the music was made

Albert has been making his own eccentric, charming, witty animated movies for many years. His early piece Red Type, Black Type was so successful it was blown up to 35mm and played the Odeon Haymarket in London. You can catch a hint of how the man's mind works by visiting his funderful website.

Albert explains a 35 year gap between it and Clip Joint by saying he was busy:

designing and building a computer controlled (BBC micro!) simulated church organ
writing music for it
building a seismographic station (now defunct)
building and writing software / hardware to search for ET on 1420 Meg hertz (so far in vain.)

An article by and about him is due to appear in the July / August issue of Film & Video Maker magazine, so to complement it we asked for some publicity pictures from his stars.

His response: they'd make all make great 'pin ups' !! :-) :-)

The Stellar Cast

... a pair of star-crossed lovers in fair Verona ... played by the Staples Twins	Mr. Ryman makes a bigger splash.	The Traffic Light Trio unwind.
The ensemble perform to the syncopated rhythms of Mr. Noble's All Star Darts Team and Ferret Wrangling Jazz Band.	Tilly Dingle and her Synchronised Anodised Swimmers	Audiences may be assured that nothing offensive to ladies, servants or children occurs in the performance.
Brimley Town Boys Brigade Acrobatic Team in flamboyant mood	The Hermione Grundridge Bronze Medal Formation Dance Team	Tom, Dick and Evadne sand dancers and contortionists by appointment

Making Music

Cakewalk Home Studio boxes. I used Cakewalk's Home Studio software to write/create (call it what you will), the music for the film. This software allows one to work with up to 8 instruments at any one time, which can be selected from various instrumental groupings, such as orchestral / jazz quintet / big band etc. If one selects say 'orchestral' then violins are available, but not saxophones! Conversely, if one selects 'jazz quintet' then various saxes are available, but not violins.

One can enter the musical notes either by normal music staff notation. (the 5 lines we see on music sheets. FACE and EGBDF, which you will be familiar with), or one can enter notes by what is known as 'piano roll' entry. (a vertical keyboard represents note pitch, and the horizontal length of a line represents time a note is held for (crotchet/quaver/minim etc).

Each instrument has its own colour on the screen.

I used the jazz instruments to write the short pieces for the film and Home Studio then played them back and I transferred them to an audio file. This was put onto the Premiere timeline to enable me to 'track read' each note ( to establish the frame count between each note.) This enabled the visual animation to synchronised with this pre recorded music.

Home Studio costs about 70 quid.

Just an interesting footnote....like some of the Beetles when they started, I do NOT read music at all! So I write all my music for my films now using the 'piano roll' entry method.

Albert Noble
Email: Animation@btopenworld.com
website: http://www.btinternet.com/~animation/PHOTOGRAPHS/

Visit Cakewalk's website.

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

Free JavaScripts provided
by The JavaScript Source