One day, while waiting in the LAX airport for a flight to New Zealand, I checked my email.  Hm... that’s odd.  I’m getting a bunch of comments from YouTube on the Automata (Page One) soundtrack.  Wow... the hits on YouTube went from 30 to over 300 overnight.  What’s going on?  I checked Penny Arcade and saw that they very graciously linked to the video.

Since then they have completed the first chapter, six pages, of Automata.  And of course I had to complete the music for it.  But first was getting the comics together in iMovie.  I decided to try something different: align all the clips on 0.5 intervals.  That meant each clip was some multiple of 0.5 seconds long.  The idea was that I could set the soundtrack to 60 BPM and have it align nicely with the video.  The more music and audio I could align to 60 BPM (not all had to be all 60 BPM, it just needed to be a multiple of it) the easier it would fall together.  Overall, the idea worked well.  It took extra effort to pace the clips together naturally and with that BPM, but once the music was placed, it worked great.  This was especially important for the Claptraps jazz piece.

Again I had some difficulty with iMovie.  The first is the “Ken Burns” effect has no acceleration controls so it can feel “wooden”.  In particular, I wanted the dialog where Carl explains his Clickwise conversation to be back-and-forth and have a palpable “beat” right before Carl answers “Yes.  Very briefly”.  There was no way to transition from the pan to zoom in without a pause in the motion.

The other problem is that I really want to be able to “pin” a clip to the overall time line.  Right now, if you insert a clip between two others, it moves the later clips.  If something was timed to music, I have to go and modify all the clips and keep track of the math for all the clips to that spot I wanted to pin.  I should probably file a feature request with Apple.

Trying to write music for all frames of the comic just didn’t feel right, so I opted to do a mix of sound effects for atmosphere and a piece in the middle and a closing piece.  The sound effects ranged from city rain to a door unlocking, a highly charged bouncer hum to background bar noise (without drinks of course).  The most important effect though was “Clickwise”.

The authors had introduced the automaton language as a series of black bars with and without dots.  I’m not sure how much thought they put into it, but it probably would surprise them to know that translated very well to written music.  There is a particular writing mode in Logic Pro called “Piano Roll”.  It is a grid layout where each row maps to a key on a piano.  It’s better for composing percussion lines rather than traditional staff notation.  I spent a couple hours searching for a good instrument, something that would satisfy the “click” but also not be too machine-like.  I figured that when the automatons were originally and released, the noise they made would have been engineered to be pleasant for humans.  Then I mapped the drawing to the notation: white space meant no sound, black was a low note, black with dots was the low note plus one to six dots at fixed intervals above.  I speed it up (16th notes @ 720 BPM) to where the individual tones were recognizable and “clicky” and voila!  Clickwise!

I played guitar in my high school jazz band, but I sucked.  I really don’t get jazz.  So when the Claptraps came into the comic, I hung my head.  Boy, I bet Mr. Lack (the band teacher) was laughing now.  Double-whammy that I’m still healing from having my arm plated back together, which meant no guitar playing.  I scoured my audio database and found ONE trumpet loop, TWO trombone loops, 3 or 4 upright bass lines and a few jazz drum loops.  Oy, this was going to be hard.  The time signature of the jazz piece was important, so I arranged the loops into a 5/4 intro so if it feels weird, it is.  5/4 at 240 BPM is difficult to count, much less play.  What drives Carl mad as well as the gun shots was integrated into the music and eventually what the band was playing becomes the backing music for the fight.  This was a happy accident and I like the “breaking down the 4th wall” implication of it.  I ended up playing a few piano stabs myself, recapping a line from the title music.  Overall, I’m pretty happy with it: it feels good, works well with the comic and I didn’t have to try to fake jazz trumpet on a keyboard.

I started writing the end music with just the piano, capturing some of the notes from the title music.  But when I started adding more instruments to it, it began to lose it’s... sincerity.  The end comic is not sad nor is it happy, it just kind of... is.  Carl just kind of... is.  So I threw almost everything away, kept two strings for texture and a little dissonance and left it alone.  The piano and the rain say everything that needs to be said.

If you feel it ends on an undone note, then you are correct.  It is undone because the story is not done.  I look forward to what else Penny Arcade does in the Automata universe.  They started a great story and have let me contribute what I can to it, I am very grateful for that.