Things are moving along and I am hitting my stride. Over 20% of the score has been written and the quality is increasing with every cue. At least it feels that way.

It’s funny, there have been times when I just knew that I had nailed a scene, and other times I wasn’t sure, feeling that perhaps I had taken the tempo too slow or made a wrong choice.

When I thought I had done it wrong I would get very depressed about it, distraught really, but I would let it sit a while, get some distance from it, and almost invariably, when I returned to it I was amazed that suddenly those choices I took great care in making (tempo, harmony, structure) really did work!

A deadline is a great way to remove paralysis by analysis!

Two evenings ago I sat with my wife Sophie, after the kids had gone to bed, and we watched a bit of the film with the music put in.

Watching and listening my work with someone else helps me see it through their eyes. I become much more objective about what I’ve done this way.

So when we watched together I could tell instantly, it was working. After we were done, Sophie turned to me and said with a huge grin “this is going be a good movie!”

Now, I am waiting on some new video to get more work done.

Well, I have passed the 10% mark for the score! That is simply 10 minutes of fully orchestrated, written down music out of 100 minutes.

It started out a bit rough but I am hitting my stride here. That is quite normal.

I just completed a dialogue scene which had a difficult mix of moods to navigate; emotional discussion/sharing of wisdom interspersed with some slap-stick humour. It was tough, but I pulled it off.

Another thing I wanted to write about here was pacing. It something i am very conscious of and that makes a good score a great score, in my opinion, and something John Williams is a master of.

Right now I am still working on the the opening act of the film so I am writing in a specific way to support that:

1. Avoiding being too big with the music. The big moments are at the end so the music needs to wait for that – to a certain degree.
2. No magical textures in the orchestra. The magic is in the second act, so right now I am using more urban sounds: rock, Chinese traditional, city feel like Gershwin meets Shanghai… sort of.
3. Being more melodic as I lay down the main themes. That’s what John Williams does in Harry Potter, he presents the themes often in the first act. This helps give an opening feel to the story-telling and also makes the theme stick in the memory more. After that, I will incorporate them in other cues, but more as leitmotives that are sprinkled over a different melodic structure.

I am avoiding the magical textures because I do not have an foreshadowing opportunities. It’s sort of like Back to the Future; the orchestra only rolls out along with the DeLorean, when the film changes tone completely. Before that plot point there is no orchestra at all.

In my film, the first act presents the protagonist and we do not expect that he will be taken on this journey into another world. (Well, I guess you do because I am providing spoilers here… ah well.)

Actually, I am lying here… I do foreshadow! The main theme that occurs over an areal shot of  19th Century London is something I designed to come back as a hero theme in the end.

I haven’t’ seen the end, though, so I hope it works out! I am sure it will be fine.

Anyway, that is my update for today. Time to write the scene where the magic begins! Cool!

Alain

PS: I received some of the final vocals from Cary Shields a few days ago and they rock. The ending song/production number is going to rock! Thanks Cary!

Right now I am scoring a robot wrestling match! It’s a lot of fun and a lot of notes. I am spending a lot of time on getting a good orchestration and the mockup is also labour-intensive.

My approach is a mixture of gladiator fanfares, rock and Mickey-Mousing. It’s an animated film, after all, so following the action is part of the style, but I am avoiding being too clichéd about it.

A very important thing I should mention is how I am aiming to complement sound effects which are not their yet. I am imagining what the sounds will most likely be of robots fighting, and I imagine it will be a lot metallic clanging: like a robot percussion section!

In the old Warner Brother cartoons, Carl Stalling actually was the sounds effects man most of the time. In this film this will not be the case, of course.

So when there is the clanging of colliding metal as the robots fight, I consider that as the percussion section and write music that accompanies that. If I add percussive elements it will only be in conflict with what the rest of the audio track  and cause audio confusion.

When there is a big bang because a big orb falls on one of them, I can imagine the resonant boom it will be and that is my bass drum, I don’t need to write one in, and shouldn’t include bass drum in there actually, it will muddy things up and it won’t be heard anyway.

Back to work!

Alain

Writing for Silk Boy is officially under way!

Brad Stark is doing orchestration and engraving duties and I am so lucky to have him with me.

Our approach is this: I give  him detailed short scores which he then puts into Finale, checking them as he goes for mistakes, omissions and offering suggestions. I also give him a mock-up so he can hear the intentions.

I am used to doing short scores for myself which I then either sequence or engrave, so right now I have to re-learn how to do them in a clearer way. (Brad is having a fun time trying to figure out my writing…sorry Brad! My music notes, however, are perfectly fine.)

Since I got the video files somewhat behind schedule, I have quite a lot of work to do everyday. So off to work I go!

John Williams was speaking of his early days in the business, how he got hired to do TV shows and had to do a 20 minute score every week, by hand, without an orchestrator.

He said that this was the kind of training you can’t buy! And he is right.

The good news is that it appears I will be getting that kind of training on the animated feature film.

The bad news is because the film is behind schedule, and we are now having problems with the video file uploads which will take perhaps up to a week or two to get solved.

On the positive side: this has given me time to find out that my MIDI controller was dying and get a new one installed. And now my 10 year old printer has died, so I got another one this morning.

This would have been hard to do in the heat of composition.

Also on the positive side, I am getting more time to prepare my themes, look at films for models and analyze scores. This should, hopefully, make the score better.

The rate at which I will have to write will be great training for sure, and I am thankful for that, and will also mean that there will be no time for rewrites. That’s not a bad thing.

I will most likely come out of the other end of this process forever cured of “paralysis by analysis!” And that’s a good thing, right?

Also positive is that, all the problems with codecs and files getting truncated while uploaded to the FTP got me learning t0ns about subjects I knew very little about. I will end up really knowing lots about video formats and ftp (thanks to Chris, my guardian-angel/computer tech!). And that’s good too, right?

Still, I can’t help feeling slightly stressed out… and that’s not good…