For the ISTD 2021 brief, we were asked to celebrate the Silent Era. This brief encouraged us to either go broad with films, tv and actors, or to find a niche topic within the subject to focus on. For my book, I decided to celebrate the "Not So Silent Era." I found that all silent films always had a live accompaniment or orchestra, and proved to never be silent after all. "Far From Quiet" celebrates the forgotten and influential music of the Silent Era, and illustrates a timeline of the music, and what eventually developed into what we call the movie soundtrack today.
Far From Quiet takes inspiration from the music preformed during silent films. The music accompaniment would range from a singular pianist to a full orchestra. Musicians started off by improvising with the film as it played, and later developed into scores being made for moods and scenes that would be recommended for musicians to play. This book is inspired and laid out similarly to how the books of music were at the time given to the musicians. This includes an index down the side for easy page turns and colour coded cues.
End Pages
Contents
Deaf Cinema
Blank Sounds Like
To give a sense of the live music and how immersive the experience must of been, I incorporated Spotify codes to scan as you flicked through the book so one could get a sense of the music played to the moods and situations.
Moods and Situations
This page showed the index of all the situations and moods suggested for musicians to look at while playing with a film.
I wanted to create some expressive typography that reflected the music played to help the reader better understand what the music was like. There was also an opportunity with motion for these expressive pages.
Cue Sheet
Quote Page