Background

Romantic Story is a 16mm short, first made as a Super 8 film by → ↑ → in 1981. The film takes an extremely cheap romance comic omnibus, and uses three of its short stories to make a 3-part film. The film score perfectly complements this.

Credits

1984

Composition, performance & production - Philip Brophy

Overview

The tone and appearance of the Romantic Story film would easily attract negative readings: inept, vaccuous, amateur, atrocious, bad. While most movies seem to be proud that they are somehow 'making better' either their originating novel, their original script, or the preceding version of their reboot, the conceptual exercise in Romantic Story was to be as true as possible to the originating comicthat, is, to not 'make it better' or transform it cinematically. The music score follos this terse and perverse logic. Three 'themes' were composed using a digital keyboard as cheap as the pulp-printed comic used for the film. The music thus tries hard to be naive, stunted, irritating and bankrupt. The melodies, arrangements and instrumentation are the the aural equivalent of hurriedly drawn romance comics and their lurid love stories.

Technical

All three musical themes are performed on a Technics SX-K200. This model has around 20 lo-end digital timbrel settings, an in-built rhythm pattern generator (8 styles like "rock", "march", "disco", "swing", etc.) and a range of automatic play functions. These feature select 'styles' of bass runs, chords fixed in keys, and a corresponding arpeggiator. These three features are automated by holding a single key down, which will generate the bass, chords and arpeggiator, all in key and in keeping with the chosen musical style of the rhythms.

The instrument seemed tailor made for the score required of Romantic Story. Each of the short stories in the 3-part film are in one of these 'styles': the 'wild girl' plot of Too Many Kisses is accompanied by the 'disco' style; the jaunty poor-girl/rich-boy marina love of Never Trust A Sailor is accompanied by the '16 beat' style; and the country swamp hillbilly saga of Forbidden Ground is accompanied by the 'swing' style. All three compositions are mostly recorded live with no overdubs, sticking with the Casio MT-65's ability to be a 'one man band' providing pap music for a desired yet numbing social setting.