Recently I was informed that the extended edition Blu-Ray of The Desolation of Smaug, the second film in the recent Hobbit Trilogy had a rather good feature on the music of the films. I decided to check it out and here we are.
A lot of it revolves around orchestration and how they dealt with that side of music, showcasing the large number of people involved in the process and also demonstrating the last minute changes that get made to the music even when you have huge amounts of music written for large orchestra’s, playing in large buildings.
Many of these decisions are made by the director, judging things on the fly for how they’ll work best with the film, with the conductor and orchestrator (in this case the composer was in another country) making snap decisions on how to change things up to meet with the directions from the director, such as a scene not having enough tension at the start. It talks about how Peter Jackson doesn’t have the knowledge to speak musically, so it’s up to the people who do to interpret the way in which he talks about the film in terms of what he wants the music to portray to work out how that would come across musically. This involves a quick thinking mind and in depth knowledge of instruments and their capabilities, as well as trust in the players and a patient orchestra.
That is all slightly irrelevant to me at the moment however, with these two films for the most part using electronic instruments. One thing from that section that was relevant was the mention of the waterphone, an instrument I’ve used on Descent and the way in which I saw it being used in this has made me want to go back and see if I can improve my own use of the instrument, which ended up with me adding a single extra note of Waterphone to the score…big changes indeed.
Compositional style and the way in which how you work changes on different films was mentioned. For example, it was said that for these films Howard Shore produces themes for places, cultures and characters before seeing any picture, going off art, the script and the books. This then allows him to base the rest of the score off these themes, which help ground the films by making all the characters and places more recognisable, helping to ground them in reality in a way the audience can understand, something which is especially important to do in Fantasy films such as this. This corresponds slightly with how I seem to have slightly different ways of working with different directors and situations. During this project I’ve found that I have a less personal relationship with the directors I’m scoring for, instead using the rest of the team as a first port of call for reactions to the music. This is also different from how I’ve worked in the past, where I’ve used a music editor/arranger/orchestrator as first port of call. The work I’ve been doing in Immort has been similar to the themes in a way, in that I’ve ended up referencing things several times, planting seeds throughout the film. One example of this is the use of double bass, one of only two non-electronic instruments in the score and therefore somewhat of an oddity, but one that helps to capture a key aspect of the film, which is that of the main characters humanity/individualism either disappearing or coming back with her use of nano-bots or destruction of them and this realism helps to show that she feels that life without the nano-bots is the more natural way of things and is perhaps how things should be.