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hand-made-music.co.uk Composer Broadcast on BBC 2

"The Seagull Ogles While We Pass By" was broadcast on BBC2 on 3rd December 2006. The original score by Laura Callaghan combines sound and music to create a suitably abstract world to accompany the illustrative animated short, created by talented freelance animator Elle Farnham. "A visual melody of images, form the film to create a picture," explains Elle Farnham "in which we see the mundane as beautiful, making the viewer aware of what they usually just pass by".

Composer Laura Callaghan, comments on her work, detailing the compositional processes and creative decisions made: "As the animation is very spontaneous, rough and sketchy, the music/sound had to follow suit: there are loose flashes of buildings, rhythmic cuts between seemingly figurative objects, pencil sketches which interrelate with camera stills and so on. The pace of the animation is also very important, and at times the speed of cuts become slower and the frames become emptier. The animator wanted raw, environmental sounds typical of a walk along a city street: the sounds and music are layered and overlapped in a way that relates to the images of the animation. A feeling of randomness and impulsive sound/music was required by the animator: the layering peaks and toughs, from dense layering to minimal layering in accordance to the picture, but still maintaining an undercurrent of the urban environment. Simple and repeated musical ideas were the most appropriate as they were intended to musically represent the walking figure, lost in this all-encompassing sea of sound and images."

"Despite the seeming randomness of environmental sound layering, there is quite clearly nothing random about the choices made: there is a clear structure from calm to chaotic and back to calm again, and this is mirrored in the sound/animation relationship. The project was a collaborative effort, whereby creative choices were made by the animator in response to my work, and the other way around."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blast/