Penny Arcade has been a stop on my daily interweb activities for the last several years.  Never mind the fact that they too escaped the clutches of Spokane (I actually escaped from a smaller, crappier town 30 minutes away from there), I’ve followed the site for it’s interesting game reviews, well-voiced opinions and frequent chuckling over the ying-yang relationship of the comic’s Gabe and Tycho characters.  The avatars for Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, respectively.

Last Friday they posted a comic called “Automata” and it struck something in me.  It took me all day to figure out that I should write some music for it.  On Saturday, I was awoken by some music running through my head.  But I needed a moving storyboard to organize it to.  I started by clipping out the frames of the comic into individual images, then ordering them in iMovie.  I used the “Ken Burns Effect” to add motion and three hours later I had about 3 minutes of video I was happy with.  I decided that 72 BPM was the correct tempo so all the cuts were aligned as close to that as possible.  Sadly, iMovie only allows 0.1 seconds of granularity when setting the clip length and maddeningly refused to allow .3 or .5 values for no apparent reason.  This was a bit frustrating when trying to make a really crisp cut timed with the beat.

Now the music.  I started with the drums.  I wanted something thick and deep, so I triple-tracked the kick drum with two differently distorted LFE “buuhhmm” sounds.  The comic’s story is about detectives and 1920s techno-noir, so I needed tweaked “jazz” instruments.  I found a few wicked laid-back upright bass loops in my library and effected those for some edge.  I chose a warm piano sound to reference humans.  The “Carl” character is mechanical, so there are bit-crushed, reversed guitars and other effects that introduce him.

The intent of the cops is voiced by the cellos, dark and with purpose.  I felt like the cops pushing Carl around was the comic’s climax and that despite being mechanical, perhaps he too was capable of that searing white flash of human anger.  The music pitched up during the fade-to-white, then the rain slowly washes it away in a fade-to-black.

When Detective Regal entered the scene, I wanted a change, in feel and key.  At this point the piano takes over and helps establish the friendship between the two.  But underneath, as in all good stories, there is much more.  A thicker, heavier and distorted (bit-crushed and reversed) guitar swells in to start the outro music.  I didn’t want to lose the noir roots, so the piano plays a major/minor melody on top of the downward moving chords.

One of the final touches was a warmly reverbed (is that a word?) shaker, done in that mysterious “what’s going on” way.  Mixing a light percussive rhythm on top of a slowly moving line is a great way to add tension.  Another touch was a heavily flanged standard trumpet, just to set tone at the very beginning.  I didn’t have muted trumpet samples to work with, so that had to do.

I did the lion’s share of the music on Saturday, followed by some remixing and tweaking on Sunday.  By 5pm I had sent the guys an email asking permission (since it is based on their copyrighted work) to post it.  They politely responded Monday morning with a “thumbs up” so a couple more tweaks (laid-back the drums a bit) then it was posted.  Many, many thanks for Jerry and Mike for allowing me to post the video.  Keep doing what you’re doing, please.