Synchromy (1971)
- Directed by
- Norman McLaren
- Genre
- musical film
- Country
- Canada
- Runtime
- 7 min
- Rating
- 6.8 of 10 from 21 voters
- Elsewhere
- IMDb
The catalogue in 3D
The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.
How it feels
This film shows the shapes of musical notes as colorful moving stripes on screen. The filmmaker created both the music and the visuals using the same patterns of lines.
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What happens
Synchromy (French: Synchromie) is a 1971 National Film Board of Canada visual music film by Norman McLaren utilizing graphical sound. To produce the film's musical soundtrack, McLaren photographed rectangular cards with lines on them. He arranged these shapes in sequences on the analog optical sound track to produce notes and chords. He then reproduced the sequence of shapes, colorized, in the image portion of the film, so that audiences see the shapes that they are also hearing, as sound. McLaren had experimented with this technique for creating notes through patterns of stripes on the soundtrack area of the film in the 1950s, working with Evelyn Lambart. Their technique was based on earlier work in graphical sound by German pioneer Rudolf Pfenninger and Russian Nikolai Voinov. The creation of Synchromy was documented by Gavin Millar in a 1970 film called The Eye Hears, The Ear Sees. In McLaren's production notes, he stated that "Apart from planning and executing the music, the only creative aspect of the film was the “choreographing” of the striations in the columns and deciding on the sequence and combinations of colours." The film received eight awards, including a Special Jury Mention at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)
More like this
Street Musique (1972)
Short and Suite (1959)
Lines: Vertical (1959)
Video Selfportrait (1971)
Des ensembles (1971)
Metadata (1971)
Opus 3 (1967)
Lines: Horizontal (1960)- More like this film, on a shelf you can walk up to.It's the lit case on the top shelf.