FILM COMPOSER BLOG

Post-production is still wrapping up, but Contractor's Routine will show at the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival on April 17th. Saturday night, 9pm. The director Yuri Tsapayev plus cast and crew will be attending.

Cinesource has an interview of Yuri about the film.

Shot and produced almost entirely in San Francisco, the film follows a carpenter Jacob Borchevsky struggling to tamp down his psychological turmoil - personified in his mentoring alter-ego Esau - before it explodes into irreparable cataclysm. Tsapayev, who wrote, directed, and produced the debut indie is presenting his film - still without distribution - throughout the festival circuit. With impressive acting performances and skillful direction talent, the film is an obvious choice to be picked up by a leading indie distributor.

More here.

Not a shocker. Even though The Hurt Locker was racking up awards, everyone talked about how they cried during Up's 4-minute sequence showing of Carl and Ellie's life together, and the music was prominent.

Up's score is refreshingly old-fashioned - prominent themes, exhuberant instrumentation, and unafraid to express the emotion of the characters. There are musical allusions to classic films like the Wizard of Oz. The music breaks through. So many Hollywood scores are like wallpaper - tasteful wallpaper appropriate to the scene - but very few connect emotionally like Up. I've been a fan of Michael Giacchino ever since he scored the PS2 video game Medal of Honor: Frontline.

The Hurt Locker's score, by Marco Beltrami, is practically the opposite. It's restrained to the point of being sound design as much as it is music. Dissonances and middle eastern modes make the deserted Baghdad streets dangerous and alien. Beltrami's scores can be very restrained (including the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma). Both films have characters who are strung out, thirsty, without sleep, and near death. His minimal style suits scenes of such exhaustion.

One hears complaints among composers that we're in a very "cool" period for film scores - meaning that directors don't want melodies, or anything that might be showy or obvious. Perhaps out of fear of condescending to the audience. Or perhaps out fear of sounding corny. The Hurt Locker, and also No Country for Old Men, are very much in this camp.

Either way, these 2 composers have styles that were well-matched to their respective films.

A cursed Scabble board brings its words to life. Events turn predictably sinister. I'll be scoring an upcoming version of this film with a group of San Francisco filmmakers led by John Howard.

It's based on a short story by Charlie Fish, which turns out to be a rather popular as a short film subject. Googling around for Tile M for Murder and Death by Scrabble turns up a trove of amateur short films recasting this story.

Note to self: don't chew on Scrabble tiles. 

I'll post more news as this project gets into post production.

The Amazon blog Armchair Commentary comments on film score music in the figure skating competition:

Last night's pairs figure skating competition had a lot of people going "Where HAVE I heard that song before?" particularly during Amanda Evora and Mark Ladwig's short routine, set to the "Portuguese Love Theme" from Love Actually. (Ironically, this piece of music, which is used on 1 out of 5 romantic film trailers and in Oscar montages, is not actually on the soundtrack, nor available for purchase as a track. Grrrr.)

Actually, I managed to find Portguese Love Theme this online. It's true: itunes has only a 5-song version of the soundtrack, and Amazon US has a 17-song version. However the UK version (available on Amazon UK) has 20 tracks, including the Craig Armstrong Portugese Love Theme.

And then there's YouTube:



This piece is now 7 years old, but it perfectly expresses the film culture. The music is straightforward, and it over the course of 3 minutes it really builds to a climax. Kind of like the best pop songs when you think about it.

Budweiser cribbed some of Alan Silvestri's score for Forrest Gump for it's Fences ad in the Super Bowl.
It starts about halfway through the ad:




And here it is in Forrest Gump:



Alan Silvestri's score was probably Oscar-worthy (it was nominated), but had to compete against The Lion King that year. The score sounds very up to date, it's probably the single thing that got me interested in film scoring, and is extremely listenable. Try "Run Forrest Run" towards the end of your running playlist. ;-)

Dixie Dynamite has another screening coming up, this on is in El Paso, Saturday night, Jan 14th, at UTEP. This is the closing film of the Binational Independent Film Festival. The director Bob Clark will be there to discuss the film with the audience.

I liked this excerpt from the article:

Festival director Cesar Alejandro, who hired Clark as director of photography for his 2005 low-budget film "Juárez: Stages of Fear," has been trying to get Clark in the festival for years.

Alejandro said "Dixie Dynamite" is a perfect example of the eclectic and very independent nature of his festival. He thinks the movie, with its unusual animation and offbeat story and music, will be a hit here and elsewhere.

"We're lucky to find some jewels sometimes," Alejandro said, noting that a couple of previous festival entries have gone on to win Academy Awards.

That would work for me. ;-)

The news has come from If Magazine that Nic Hooper won't be scoring the final Harry Potter films. This has touched off a lively discussion on MuggleNet (most seem to want John Williams back).

The San Francisco Classical Voice blog took the opportunity to contrast the John Williams and Nic Hooper styles in the series.

On John Williams' wall-to-wall scoring style:

In fact, the only unscored scenes are when Harry is with his adoptive parents in their humdrum daily existence. There, Harry lives in a joyless world without magic, without hope, and without music. When the magic arrives, in the form of Hedwig and the fateful letters from Hogwarts, the music comes along with it.

On Nic Hooper's broader stylings:

The appearance of the Dementors brings a dramatic flare from the strings, and a grunting chorus and string line that could have been drawn straight out of a Schoenbergian atonal work. Harry’s magic spell is accompanied not by the celestes and glockenspiels of Williams’s score, but by an unidentifiable electronic sound. And when the attack is over, the music again fades down to nothing. A whole sequence with no immediately identifiable musical structure: such a concept would have been unthinkable in Williams’s musical soundscape.

(By the way my favorite Harry Potter score is definitely #3. And I don't agree with the premise that John Williams' style can't accommodate darker themes. Remember Anakin's dark deeds in Revenge of the Sith...)

Soundworks Collection is making high-quality web videos profiling sound designers. They're a bit slick (and the first 2 minutes are pure promo material for the films), but they settle in to useful interviews of hte sound desiners in the film.

Some interesting bits from their Star Trek profile: the designers often reused original series sound effects (the original phaser blasts were made from Zube Tubes), where you hear Russian train toilet flushes in the film, and the clever choice of sound for ships going to warp.

Plus there's plenty of Michael Giacchino's score to be heard in this 6-minute profile:


"Star Trek" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Could be my favorite Will Ferrell moment at 1:29 into this clip......

Aw what the heck. I'll be putting this more properly on my site, but here are 5 clips from the film I did this fall, Contractor's Routine. I've included an image below. Here's the site and imdb listing. These clips aren't up there yet, but here they are for now:

Here's a still from the film, by Paralux Productions:

David Byrne has a bit of a must-read post spurred on by the $32M LA production of Wagner's Ring cycle. He makes the case that money spent on recreating past works of art would be better spent on music in education:

Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools

The money line:

The dead guys won’t write more symphonies.

His argument is more nuanced than that one pithy phrase. I find myself in partial agreement, but here is here I diverge:

...it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery.

Calling for kids to make music "in any form" is too low a standard. One can argue playing Guitar Hero teaches musical rhythm. Sure, it's fun, but it's rote. Why not aim high?

And as to the value for a student to "understand and appreciate" works of the past, I would submit to you this rather traditional, old-fashioned painting:

The artist? Pablo Picasso.

Before he invented Cubism, Picasso took the time to understand, appreciate, and indeed master what came before him. He was fifteen.

More David Byrne:

Bach, Mozart and Beethoven I never could get, and I don’t feel any the worse for it. There’s plenty left to love and enjoy. This whole rant, I guess, derives a little from the fact that I resent the implication, and sometime-feeling, that I’m less of a musician and even a person for not appreciating those works. It’s not true!

Absolutely. But we shouldn't be quick to dismiss the dead guys. After all, we'll all be dead too someday. And if you're David Byrne, can you really object if garage bands in the year 3000 are jamming to "Burning Down the House"?

I was rooting for Unchartered 2, but Halo's music has evolved quite a bit since the original game. There's a wider range and more depth. The overture has a wistful intro that is downright Copland-esque. One can quibble with some of the orchestral sounds being a little synth-y, but it's all in how the music moves the player during gameplay, and Halo does it better than any other game.

Composers are Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori: