[P3] Full Worklog (Complete)

Final Product

<aside> 🎶 The Merry-go Round of Life, the main theme for Howl's Moving Castle, is one of the most famous film music pieces ever. One of the reasons why this piece is especially memorable is because it is repeated throughout the film in over 20 ever-changing variations of the same tune. This work visualizes each scene in which a variation of the main theme occurs, and visualizes the music in the strongest moment of the scene along with Sophie's emotion and impact of the scene.

</aside>

<aside> 🗣️ I love film music. Film music is special because what you feel from a scene has a very high correlation with the background music of the scene. So composers like Joe Hisaishi take care in selecting the right main instrument and supporting instruments, tempo, volume, time signature, and melody variation. I wanted to show how these choices actually correlate to the emotion and impact of the scene

</aside>

Insights

There are many insights that can be obtained, but to name a few:

• Role
  • These stars all represent the same main melody, of which we are extremely familiar. By examining the stars, we can easily figure out that woodwinds are used the most for the main melody.
• Similarity between emotions
  • There are only three scenes, that are "funny", and you can see that in all of them the main melody is plucked strings.
  • Similar observations can be made with pianos - keys are only used as the main melody for either "sad" or "loving" scenes.
• Outlier
  • An outlier is on the top right - this scene has a 4/5 time signature! It is fitting as many say 4/5 feels quirky and the scene is indeed a funny and bright scene.