FAR FROM QUIET

Project Overview

ISTD 2021 – Project 2 – Silence is Golden

As part of my final year in college, we were asked to follow the ISTD brief & guidelines to generate a book or chosen application. For the ISTD 2021 brief, I decided to choose Project 2 – Silence is Golden. This brief asked us to celebrate the Silent Era, either as a whole or to find a niche that captured our interest. From my research, I found that silent films were actually not so silent after all! Silent films were always accompanied by live music or performance. The music accompaniment transformed the experience of silent films into live entertainment. For my ISTD submission, I decided to focus on the music of the Silent Era & to show it was far from quiet.

Far From Quiet

Far From Quiet celebrates the forgotten & influential music of the Silent Era. The book takes inspiration from the music preformed during silent film showings. It illustrates a timeline of the music, & what eventually developed into what we call the movie soundtrack today. The music accompaniment would range from a singular pianist to a full orchestra. Musicians started off by improvising with the film as it played, & later developed into scores being made for moods & scenes that would be recommended for musicians to play during the film. This book is inspired & laid out similarly to how the books of music & moods were given to the musicians at the time. This includes indexes on every page for easy page turns & colour coded cues.

MOTION

I later experimented with the idea of motion, if the book could become interactive.