Tag: Learning Outcome One

Over the last few days it dawned on me, that despite Blade Runner being initially ruled out as an influence for Immort, it is actually, at least musically, quite representative of what the director actually wanted for the early segments of the score. The film didn’t end up being reference material, with, as mentioned before the score for the Mass Effect series of games being an inspiration.

This had led me to thinking about the process for scoring the film. Originally I wasn’t attached as the composer, though I was in line to produce the music, with a band of the directors choosing in line to score the film in a jazz style. Around this time we had a conversation about how I would score the film (it was fairly different script wise at this point) and I was pointing to a modern feeling synth based score, possibly including a few natural instruments to add some emotional content to the score at points. At this point the director still wanted the band, but wasn’t sure.

After Christmas I was told that he wasn’t able to get the band anymore, so the job was mine if I wanted it, which of course I gladly accepted. The first reference tracks came that very night, consisting of tracks such as:

This is obviously quite different from how things turned out.

Further to this point diegetic music was originally more important than it is now, with two pieces of diegetic music in the film when Sici first enters the apartment. One of these, the cheesy pop track made it in, an old track I made three or four years ago called Monster (https://soundcloud.com/jonesm94/monster). The other was intended to be a rap rock style piece, which I was going to write specifically for the film with the idea that it would help explain her motivations through lyrics relating to invasion of privacy of technology. However, as this track progressed, I realised that I was getting no clear direction on how far either way to lean, with the half written product being an amalgamation of my style of electronic music, my style of rock and a bass line inspired by hip hop. After filming and then seeing a first draft of the film, I spoke to the director suggesting that this be scrapped, with the reasoning that this section of film doesn’t feel like it took place all within three minutes and that actually, non-diegetic music could portray the events much better without intruding on the isolated feeling of the character or painting her as a bit of a ‘rebel’ for lack of better phrasing. He agreed to this.

I’ve written on here about the chase scene music before, but I’ll cover that briefly again now. For the animatic I did a test piece of music, which was a piece of music heavy on threat and trying to evoke the feeling of action, while also referencing the odd jazz/electronic sound of the reference music, however, the director wasn’t keen on this style of music and asked for it to be toned down, with the start synth pad being the only surviving part. I asked for further direction, with the answer being, less real, more synth. To this end I wrote the music for the rest of the film, still keeping in mind his original jazzy wish for the music and incorporating a double bass line, inspired by The Hateful Eight’s score and while the line itself isn’t jazzy, it was a reference to his original wish, also incorporating her character into the score as mentioned in a previous post. The chase scene still proved problematic after this, though he was happy with everything after that, the issue with the chase scene boiling down to it being too threatening, which is how we ended up with the final version of the score for that scene in the film. This direction also influenced the title credit music, which now needed to seed both the more upbeat style seen in the chase scene and the style seen thereafter, something which proved quite difficult to achieve without coming across very melodramatic and cheesy.

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.

This is an example of some of the odd ways in which I come across inspiration for music when working on films:

Episode 40: Game of Thrones

Within that link is an interview with the composer for Game of Thrones – and I can tell what you’re thinking, Game of Thrones is a lot different to either Immort or Descent in scope, story, genre and importantly, musical style. Well, that is all true, but, in this interview he talks about composing music for the title sequence that Game of Thrones is famous for – and this where it starts to tie in slightly as Immort has a title sequence which I just recently received. One of the things he talks about is how he wants to represent the show within the music, so traveling is a large part of the show and as such that is represented, as is mystery and so on. This is something that I’ve attempted to do with Immort, however, this was a task made difficult by directorial decisions regarding the music. Originally, the music was all fairly dark tonally, in fitting with the atmosphere and story being portrayed in the film, however, the director didn’t want any kind of sense of threat during the chase scene…which has resulted in much cheesier and poppier music being written for that scene. Now, because the title scene comes in before that scene happens I needed to reference that style of music, while mixing it with the darker stuff later on in the film which the director liked. This proved to be quite the challenge, but something that this interview again helped with, though not through any kind of deliberation. It was mentioned how he changes key, which gave me the idea to change key briefly to help lift the tone a bit so to speak.

 

Another thing which is interesting to note is that again, for inspiration with this new direction some of the music has taken I looked at the score for Mass Effect, a game which doesn’t quite lie in the same kind of genre as this film, but nevertheless I felt could be helpful just in terms of instrumentation and how to keep something keep an action sort of feeling, but without playing to threat too much.

 

The Hollywood Reporter has some roundtable conversations with composers available for viewing on YouTube, which are very helpful sources of information for the way in which composers work in the industry.

In this one for example many topics are covered, from how the composers feel when showing directors their work, to challenges they faced on specific films to how they find inspiration for the music and how they decide upon which style of music to use on a film and so on.

One of the key things to take from this is the degree of experimentation on display, especially in the creative process of deciding how something should be scored. For example, Hans Zimmer using organs in the Interstellar score because it was a complex instrument, much like the complex ideas presented in the movie. Odd ideas such as that help to show that ideas for music can come from anywhere and as such there is no right or wrong way to go about doing something. An example of this in my work this semester is on Descent, in which I use a Waterphone – an instrument I had no idea even existed three weeks ago, however, I stumbled across it and liked the sound and therefore ended up using it in a few moments in the score, which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t have been experimenting with sounds.

Another aspect which comes up several times is the idea of understanding the film that you’re scoring. Both John Powell and Hans Zimmer talk about this, with Zimmer saying that him and Christopher Nolan talked mainly about the story rather than music as such, which helps to further the point that understanding the message of a film and the ideas it wants to portray or characters it wants to show are vital to working out how to score something. Some directors however take a different approach, with Elfman saying that Tim Burton doesn’t really talk about the music until there is something to hear, rather he just shows the film to Elfman who then starts working on the score. Both of these approaches are things I’ve worked with in the past, with the two films I’m scoring for this project being a combination of the two. But even in the cases where the directors haven’t had so much idea as to where to go with the music, gaining an understanding of the film has been key to how I’ve gone about scoring the films. This also ties quite nicely into another concept which is that of thinking about the film, where as Zimmer puts you kind of “invent a language” for a film “once you’ve got it under your nails”. This is referring to something that I’ve found that helps a lot but may seem oddly counter productive and that is just letting the film sit in your mind for a while, thinking about it from time to time and gaining a vision for the film, allowing yourself the time to work out what it is you want to do, or can do and why it needs to be done for this particular film. On Immort for example, I produced some music back when it was an animatic which upon showing the director he wasn’t overly keen on. However, between that point and the point when I scored the film I thought about it a lot, not actually sure what I could do with the music. The ‘failure’ so to speak of the conceptual piece I produced earlier helped to point me in a direction and got me on the process of working out the tonality of the score and what it needed to for the film. This process continued as I saw rough cuts, looking at the aesthetic and acting, working out what music could add to the film, how it could be interpreted by the audience and whether that was suitable or not. All this meant that by the time I could start work on the score, I knew a good deal of what I wanted to do and upon working out instrumentation it was a matter of filling in the blanks I’d created for myself while I went through the thinking the film through stage. This is something that is re-iterated by Trent Reznor as well where he brings up the idea of inspiration often striking randomly and to do with something that might be going on at that time – an example of which is again in Immort’s score, the double bass lines, the idea for them came from me having watched The Hateful Eight and then the following day having a good idea involving double bass due to a piece of music I enjoyed from the film using the same instrument.

This is in relation to learning outcome one, relating to professional practice as a composer, including things such as those mentioned above and time management skills, working out how long to spend thinking about a film, experimenting with sounds and so forth before you actually need to start working on the music and how long you should then spend recording it. While this wasn’t touched on above, it plays an important part in the workflow process of a composer, with different composers having different routines and workflows, all dictated by the time allotted for the scoring of the film to take place.

 

 

 

The other day, I was pointed in the direction of a documentary about the making of Aliens, specifically the section about James Horner, the composer for the film.

It was during this section where he commented on the poor planning of the film and the subsequent chaos it caused with the job he’d been hired to do. When he came onto the project he was given six weeks to score the film, including recording time. By the time he arrived in England to begin the process however, he found that much less than having picture lock ready for him, they hadn’t even finished shooting yet.

 

Here is the link to documentary, with the relevant section around 2:09.

I found this to be an interesting watch for several reasons. For one, it explained the difficulty in writing music for film and then subsequently having to change it to fit the timings of a film is said timings have been changed, something which I’ve come across on several occasions in the past, in a much better way than I’ve ever been able to. The description of which helped give me confidence in an issue from the perspective that even the professionals find that difficult, which is a reassuring thought.

The next important point from this was the fact that all this chaos was happening on a multi million dollar blockbuster film and on a film that has gone on to remain widely respected. As such it tells you to never expect things to go swimmingly in this business and the best you can hope for is that the people you work with are understanding. This plays well into the project we are undertaking at the moment in the sense that while everything is currently going well, in a week or two it may not be the case. This especially applies to me as a composer for two of the films, not to mention films I’m working on outside of this project. Once directors hear music, they often ask for changes to be made, sometimes incredibly small things, other times larger things. Normally, I don’t find this to be too much of an issue, after all, if I’m only involved in the film as a composer, the music is my only concern and often my point of contact is straight with the director, which leaves me feeling freer to organise meetings and send material straight to them, which then of course, gives me more time to make adjustments and generally talk to them more about the music. In this project however, I feel like I haven’t had that same relationship with directors, which is in part down to the volume of work we have to do and the number of films I’m working on, but also, in part down to the way we are operating, with different audio leads for each film, something that generally a composer doesn’t deal with, they answer straight to the director/producer or in some cases a music supervisor.

 

Overall, this post was to highlight that finding out things like this about big production and big name composers helps to make me feel better about the state of things, giving me confidence in what I’m doing and the way in which I’m doing things. This was in relation to learning outcome one.