Well, today is a big day, I am laying down all the tracks to create the complete score for Silk Boy!

I have just completed four days (from Thursday to Sunday) of intense mixing with Mr.Wizard Brian Campbell over at Sharpe Sound. Brian did wonders mixing the orchestral score and made it sound fabulous!

I picked up part of the mixes today from Brian and spent the afternoon and evening doing some editing to get them ready for the OMF.

And now it is time to build the OMF of the score! It’s 9:30PM, Monday the 19th and I am finally reaching the end of the journey.

Finally! It’s been a long road with lots of ups and downs but I seem to be ending on a high note, so all is well.

Now I just hope the score sits well in the mix…

A theme can do many things in a movie.

In this animated film I had read the script and started planning the score as best I could, which meant deciding which character, places and events would have themes.

But, as always, having a script is one thing and the final film is another. I ended up needing fewer things than I had planned on.

My composition teacher would often tell me that a good composer does a lot with a little. It always made sense to me somehow, and I do understand why now: because then the elements all feel like they “belong” together for the listener.

In film scores, it’s the same idea, to make a coherent musical landscape that supports the drama, and there as well it is good to use limited musical material.

In Harry Potter, John Williams uses the Quidditch theme for the snake’s escape earlier in the film.

This was an eye-opener for me: even though a snake and Quidditch are not related story wise, the music worked in both instance, and the end result is the use of limited material, a more coherent score, and melodies that get repeated more and thus become more memorable.

So in Silk Boy, this meant that certain themes which I initially conceived as being for a single character (in Prokofiev-like fashion) became themes for relationships.

These relationships are between the protagonist, Silkboy, and some of the other characters; grandfather, Tammy and Anya.

What that meant is that I had fewer themes and that, interestingly, Silkboy doesn’t really have much of a theme, only a guitar riff that plays when he is first presented and that is it!

The bad guys in the film have themes for their character, especially Filthington, the main baddie, which has the most developed theme of all. And also the mushrooms, which represents all of them, although I thought of one specifically as I wrote it: Puffball, which is actually quite a funny character.

But I digress; the bottom line is themes in a movie should be kept to a minimum, and that a theme can be used to support story elements that they were not initially intended to support.

So the music was done and gradually being mixed and edited, but things have been dragging on in part because the film was not done and we had the time.

But that is no longer the case.

I am very excited to report that the sound effect and foley work is set to begin any day over at Sharpe Sound (on of the top post houses in town), which means music has to be done and delivered very soon.

I was asked by the director to bring the final animation video over to Sharpe Sound, which I did this morning. Got the tour of the place (which is fabulous) and spoke with Kirby (the post sound supervisor) about our schedule and requirements.

So this is the home stretch and almost done!

Alain

One thing that became clear while working on Silkboy was that melody and the function of a scene are intertwined.

Some scenes are more important than others in a movie: some scenes are big, important, flashy scenes, while others are transitory, functional scenes that take you from point A to point B so that the story makes sense.

Both of course are important and part of storytelling, and very often the skill of actors and directors shine the brightest in making those functional scenes become interesting and alive and not simply functional.

Since Silkboy was animated, that meant wall to wall music, and I had to navigate these transitional scenes musically. For advice I turned to the master of themes, John Williams, especially the Harry Potter and Indiana Jones films, both of which had a similar musical approach to the score I was writing.

The bottom line is this:

Giving a big thematic moment to a transitional scene goes against the grain. It is better to write transitional music instead, e.g.: a bridge in a song, or an episode in a fugue or invention.

The transition scene can use secondary musical material, development of main material or simply a sequence (a musical one) or something that leads to the next scene. It is a case where musical structure again supports film structure!

Cheers,

Alain

Well, the music mix is under way and I am recording all the guitar, bass, drum and synth parts now, so the music is starting to take its final shape as we head toward the final mix.

We have had to do quite a bit of EQ work on the mix because the hall was small and the acoustics were strange and the orchestra was laid out very tightly. Not ideal. But it is sounding pretty good today and we will get something good out of it.

I am recording all the rock guitar parts for the introduction of Silk Boy; he is associated with the electric guitar.

There might be some guitar added to the orchestra as well in other parts of the score where I had not originally written it in, but we’ll see, I am not sure about that.

We have a lot of time until we need to deliver, the foley and sound effect work has not even begun, but I don’t want it to drag on either, so I want to get it done.

I have a piece to write for the VMO anyway, I’d like to get going on that.

Also, I am eager to start doing a series of posts called “what I learned from Silk Boy” as way to crystallize in my mind all I have learned during this project as I get ready for the next one.

Well, it’s all done. I haven’t written in a while because I had to deal with audio files and jet lag upon my return. I meant to, but I was just too tired!

Perhaps I will go into greater detail about the sessions, perhaps not, I’ll see, but for now I will say that it was a fantastic experience. The orchestra was top notch, the players all wonderful and very strong.

It took the first couple of days to get to know each other, but the third and fourth there was a rapport building there, smiles were more frequent and we started having a good time and being increasingly productive at the same time.

The playing came out great, the engineer was top notch and everyone there who helped out was a real treat to be with. Thanks to Ken, Andrew, Mr. Chang of Evergreen, Mr. Vincent Sung, Scott and Yungshen, Evergreen’s resident conductor Chung and everyone else for making this a really great experience.

And of course to David, the director, for giving me a chance to score this great movie!

I look forward to presenting this score to the world, but now on to the mixing!

It’s 1:56 in the AM, but I thought I wanted to capture this moment.

I created PDFs of all the score and combined it in one file:

Total page count is a staggering 413 pages.

Just finished proofreading and fixing up the copied score! Ouch, that was a huge, ton amount of work!

But it’s done and now it’s time for the parts. I just wanted to make sure I put that in here.

January 7, 2009: score complete.

Time for parts.

Happy New Year!

Well, it is crunch time. The score is complete, everything is written down and now it is time to get the scores ready for the scoring sessions.

Brad has been working like mad doing the copying, and I am doing all the proofreading and fixing up of the scores.

The days are long right now, I have been doing 16 to 17 hour days everyday since I completed the score a week or so ago.

It’s funny, and Brad was right about that, doing the engraving is much easier to work a lot for a long time than composition.

With engraving there are few uncertainties, you work long and hard and the job will get done. Not so with composition.

But it’s fun to do the copying in some ways. (Engraving and copying are interchangeable words, by the way, they both mean putting  the music into a notation software, engraving obviously referring to a by-gone era.)

It’s fun to do because it makes the music look more “real”. I get a kick out of it.

But there’s a lot to do. I have a full day ahead of me today and tomorrow. Brad is completing the last cues he has and then he has to grab the last little batch here and we should be done in a couple of days.

You know, this is a lot of work, because this is a low budget film with big budget thoughts.

So Brad and I are a two man army right now.

I wrote and orchestrated the entire film: notated and mock ups, everything. I’ll conduct and do all my music editing.

Brad engraved the entire thing and I am proofreading, doing fix-ups along the way.

And what will the result be? Just hold on to your potatoes.