Like almost all creative masterpieces, the yellow banana song is the result of an extraordinary moment of enlightenment. It all happened one Saturday morning at breakfast time. I was demonstrating to Matteo how to compose music with the iPad Garage band application. I am a musician, I play the piano, and I also consider myself an eclectic estimator of music in general. We love the great rock classics, such as Pink Floyd, AC / DC, Genesis, Queen, etc ...
I was using the app and playing some chords using the sound of an electric guitar with a rock grift. Just for fun, I started by alternating an E minor chord with an A major chord. The small test worked well. After a while, I began to introduce a D chord ... and then, to vary, I went from D to B minor. Here, with these 4 simple chords, I felt that catchy and very cantabile music was being created.
Matteo, who was curiously following the evolution of the song, suddenly started to intone the phrase "Yellow Banana" above the Riff. It was so spontaneous and genuine that we kept it as it was. We liked it immediately. That was the starting point of this song.
Matteo continued humming something above the rest of the music. It was not an easy process. The first phrase "Fingerman! What have you done this time?" sounded very Pink Floyd the Wall! Therefore we had to work at it to make it different. After all, Matteo loves 'the wall' song, That's why he was getting back to it over and over again!
It took a week to refine the music, to give it a structure and to create the necessary arrangements. All the arrangements were produced with ROLI. It was essential to give expression to the song, especially to those melodic parts describing the space travelling of Captain Fingerman.
'Garage Band' on my MacBook was fundamental to structure and tune up the song. The song resulted as a great rock punch, almost metal, but melodic enough to smooth the corners. It was ok. But we wanted to do better. We aimed to tell the entire story of Fingerman, not just talk about the Yellow Banana.
That's when we decided to introduce Fingerman's story as a RAP version. To break the rigidity of the song and to add some fun in it. The Rap part was a significant input: the classic Coupe de Teatre, the unexpected and at the same time, the fascinating surprise!
Matteo prepared the rhythmic rap base by himself, and I made the arrangements. There is a little surprise right at the end of the song too. We made it to have fun!
Once the song was finally completed, we moved to the next step. We passed several days listening to the song. Matteo kept humming the same words.
I suggested writing the lyrics as a proper song. So we did it. We collaborated in drafting out preliminary lyrics. We wrote it pretty quickly, but it took a lot of time to get the recordings right! One entire afternoon! The rap text is swift and must be recorded with precise timing. To do that, Matteo was listening to the base with headphones, while I was recording him with my iPhone.
We decided to record phrase by phrase to be sure it was perfect. In the end, we took more than 10 recordings just for the song, and an endless amount of recordings for the rap. Once the registrations were done, I put together all the material using Garage Band. The final product was amazing!
In the following week, I was testing new ways to use Procreate. I discovered that it was possible to create a short animation by exporting my drawing as a GIF or as a video file. A light bulb turned on right over my head. What if we created a video clip of the song?
And so I started working on the animations ... I wanted to show some space travelling, some Fingerman rocking, some funny laughing moments. I discovered the process was easy but very laborious. Each animation piece took hours to be produced. I started with simple black and white ones. Then I moved on to coloured drawings and, in the end, I was confident enough to have multiple animations quite articulated and complex.
It took a whole week to produce the animations that appear in the video clip. And the files were never enough. The almost 6 minutes of the song resulted very long to fit! To overcome the problem, I used the templates of iMovie to introduce text, fading transitions, and other video tools to stretch as much as possible. I edited everything with iMovie and after much, much editing, the final product was so so satisfying! We watched it many times before we decided to publish the video on Fingerman's youtube channel!
I think this modest video and the experience of producing this work was so important to us. It allowed us to learn things we didn't know before. It also allowed us to experiment with other ways of sharing our Fingerman's adventures beyond the comics. We strongly hope you like it as much as we enjoyed producing it, and share it with your family and friends. Especially share it with other children!
Remember to 'like' the Yellow Banana song. Captain Fingerman will deeply appreciate it!
- Mauro -
If you like songs, if you like bananas, if you also like silly videos, then this song is for you. The song has two parts, 1. The questions: during the song Fingerman is asked a series of questions and they are answered with a sketch where Fingerman says yes, or no. 2. The rap: in the middle of the song there is a rap, the words in the rap are a brief resume of the first book.
- Matteo -
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