Andre Gribou leaves musical "Footprints" on NASA history
By Maria Fisher, Staff Writer
January 31, 2007 | 9:38 p.m.
One of Time Magazine’s “Best Inventions of 2006,” “Science on a Sphere” is a pioneer in film technology. A movie titled “Footprints” was created in 2006 for this revolutionary technology, and OU’s own Andre Gribou composed the soundtrack.
What is it?
“Science on a Sphere” was invented by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and was literally the first product of its kind the world had ever seen: a three-dimensional screen with the appropriate projector technology to show film to audience members as if the images were a giant sphere they could touch.
A small number of museums in the world soon purchased the technology and began showing images of planets on the screen, but they were only still-frames.
The NOAA invented the screen and its projectors, but were missing a key ingredient: something to project.
“It was like inventing a giant CD player but having no CD’s,” said Gribou of these first stages of development.
The NOAA then turned the technology over to NASA with the proposition to develop the technology further, if possible. Enter Michael Starobin.
Starobin, employee of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington, D.C. birthed the idea of projecting moving film onto the giant, five-foot optical sphere.
“Even the inventor of ‘Science on a Sphere’ said it couldn’t be done,” Starobin said.
One of the most prominent challenges for the idea was the fact that the screen was indeed three-dimensional, but the film itself was not, as images are by default, two-dimensional.
Starobin compared the apparatus of “Science on a Sphere” to a globe that one might find in an elementary school classroom.
“Only this one’s animated,” he said.
Despite much disagreement as to the possibility of his idea, Starobin pursued his instincts and soon undertook the writing, directing, and producing of “Footprints,” a colorful, imaginative and dramatic film to be successfully viewed in new, spherical fashion on “Science on a Sphere.”
Released Dec. 7, 2006, “Footprints” stars our earth, its surrounding heavenly bodies and some of the recent colossal weather patterns she has harbored, as well as other scenes. But the images themselves -- impressive though they were -- would have still left the film incomplete if left alone, Starobin knew. It needed a little something in a big way: a soundtrack.
The Music
Starobin knew of a composer -- a bright, intense, absurdly talented individual he considered perfect for the job -- who happened to also be an employee of Ohio University:.<a href =http://speakeasymag.com/index.php/behindthescenes/article/pp_050106_001/> Andre Gribou.</a>
Andre Gribou is a professor in the School of Music, as well as a composer and accompanist for the School of Dance. He also teaches a class of growing popularity among the student body entitled “History of Rock and Roll” and its recently-added counterpart, “History of Rock and Roll II.”
“Not only is [Gribou] a superb musician;” Starobin said, “he doesn’t only know how to play all the right notes, he understands how the musical vocabulary affects everything: culture, politics, aesthetics. It’s thrilling to work with him.”
Gribou had worked with Starobin previously, as well as having composed pieces for dance theater, several documentaries, and even an ESPN segment. By the time “Footprints” came around, he was used to the process.
“What’s interesting about the way this works is that the graphic artists, the set designers, the narration, the story line and the filming and all that is already in the framing…the music is usually the last thing added,” he said.
But in addition to the time crunch, Gribou faced bigger obstacles.
“It was such an elaborate process,” he said. “Part of the deal was, it had never been done before! They were dealing literally with even coming up with the software.”
Gribou attacked the project with an ingenuity and courage similar to that of the product’s inventors. He recalls viewing the film for the first time on his painfully flat, torturously silent QuickTime window. The images were colorful; begging for sound; but distorted, as they were meant for a three-dimensional projection. He remembers sitting down for hours on the phone with Starobin, analyzing tantalizingly small portions of the film, spewing musical vocabulary like “Elizabethan dance era” and “the birth of western piano.” Something big was happening.
The artists continued their work, utilizing the newest and most fashionable way of recording live music: Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, which, to Gribou, only added to the fun of the composition.
MIDI is a way of translating musical sounds into a digital analog language, using elaborate software and often a keyboard. This allowed Gribou, who admittedly “didn’t have an orchestra at my disposal,” to record simulated sounds from almost any instrument he can imagine.
Gribou spoke about part of the film in which the deep-voiced narrator says a simple phrase along the lines of “Begin.” Gribou had the idea to begin a walking bass line directly after this command; a jazzy and lively sound. The bass line soon plundered into a cacophony of other instruments, including a piano, drums, cymbals, and a trumpet. With MIDI, the only actual instrument that was used to record its sound was the trumpet.
“It’s an incredibly complex program,” Gribou said of his software, which he said contains basically a gigantic selection of musical loops and sets that the user can then manipulate to fit the composition.
“The thing about MIDI is, there are all these things you have to anticipate, like the timing, the tempo, etc.,” Gribou said. “And pretty soon you realized that you just had to make 26 decisions to come up with 12 seconds of music.”
He likened the process to a giant chess game; having to predict each cause and effect with each new step and as each individual instrument interacts with the others.
“It’s enormous problem-solving,” he said. “It’s a terrific amount of fun.”
The Finished Product
As the project unfolded, Gribou’s score did not take on the sound of a high-energized techno beat or a thumping computerized chaos that one might imagine going with such a scientific mirage of satellite images and sweeping visions of outer space such as can be seen in “Footprints.” Instead, the music flowed and ebbed with the tide; jazzy at times and then beautifully melancholic at others; with scenes such as the moon played amongst a background of a somber tango of hauntingly sad piano chords. A Bach melody ripples as colors dash across the screen; seemingly in perfect sync with the music. The sounds are simplistic and classic, yet never lacking in originality.
“The trick with most film composition is finding what will reinforce the vision of the writer and director,” Gribou explained. “I had to ask myself: ‘how can I make this more of what it already is?’”
That, in a nutshell, is what Starobin had said about music influencing culture, politics, and basically everything it touches.
“Gribou is a composer who is daring enough to be quiet…to let the picture breathe sometimes,” Starobin said, because music isn’t just sounds, it’s silence too. We recognize music by what it does to everything else we experience while we hear it, he explained. Everything is music -- Gribou just needed to find the music hidden in “Footprints’” skeleton.
And, according to Starobin, he did. According to Gribou, however, he doesn’t know it can only be viewed in 10 U.S.. cities, and he still hasn’t seen it!
Is it going to Tinseltown anytime soon?
“This is the dawn of a new technology,” Starobin said. “We don’t really even know where it’s going yet.”
He likened “Science on a Sphere” to the Imax theaters. It took almost 15 years after its invention, but it eventually entered the public’s vocabulary and can now be seen in a relatively large amount of U.S. cities. A similar future possibly exists for “Science on a Sphere.” Starobin noted the possibility of walking into places such as O’Hare Airport in Chicago and seeing it one day; or it maybe making an appearance at somewhere like the Beijing Olympics.
But whatever its future, “Footprints” will always be the pioneering first moving film ever created for “Science on a Sphere,” and, thanks to Andre Gribou, Ohio University will always be a part of its record-breaking beginning.