Looking for places to have no music as I go along. Not so easy.

Animated films have traditionally been laden with music from top to bottom. There is hardly a moment without some music accompaniment.

That is fine with me, but still, I think some air is necessary even for an animated film to breathe.

But where?

Not such a simple question since most scenes in the film up until now have felt like they needed music.

This morning I did find a spot to have no music! Wonderful, especially since there has been lots of music up until this point: the arrival in Fantasy Land, a long frenetic chase scene, some slave driving music and a botched up conjuring cue.

How long is this break? A glorious 18 seconds!

Things are coming along more easily today. I’ve had a couple of days of writing action music and that’s always labour intensive, but that is done for the next little while.

One thing I am trying to do is pace the density of the orchestration. My goal is to have a variety of orchestral textures in the score.

Right now I have done:

• Bubbly city music,
• Rock action music
• Brass-heavy fighting cues without too much percussion
• Low brass slave driving music with some high strings and not much in the middle
• Fluttering and frenetic chase cues, dense in the high and middle register without much at the bottom
• All this interspersed with chamber-like moments with very light and transparent textures, like what I am writing now for the baddie.

The plan is to have a listening experience that is not always as dense as it can be. I was listening to a film score today, and it occurred to me that this particular composer always has very similar textures; Dense and rich. They are nice textures, but always the same, which makes the whole film and listening experience too homogeneous for my taste.

Something I am trying to avoid, anyway.

Well, this confirms it: being creative requires lack of pressure and needs just play.

Yesterday I wrote a big action cue (well, not big, but hard to write) and at the end a major character gets introduced and I didn’t have a theme for him yet.

So, I was too tired and it was too late to write a full-blown theme for him so I opted to just write a little comical phrase to end the action cue and leave the theme for the next day.

Well, I woke up this morning with thoughts of this little melodic fragment I just threw in there and played it this morning and it was perfect!

Completely different than the other themes, totally funny, but can also work in counterpoint with the other themes I wrote over the past few days (I quickly checked by played them together at the piano) and can also be easily adapted to action material!

So I quickly wrote it this morning and it’s very nice, I like it a lot.

I had two options for the ending phrase and my son popped into my studio in his pajamas just in time for me to play him both and get me to help decide.

He was no help though, he said he liked both.

A little aside here about this theme I wrote. I originally got sent some video of this character, Puffball, a small, funny and not too bright mushroom guard that winds up siding with the good guys later.

I had only the animation of this little mushroom guy walking very quickly across the screen. So I wrote a theme that followed that feeling I got for the character there.

Turn out, he’s not like that too much. At all, actually.

He talks in a sort of dim-witted way and doesn’t walk with the small steps most of the time. So I had to scratch that theme.

Too bad, I liked that theme…

It’s late and I am tired, but just wanted to do a quick post before I head off to the land of nod.

Today I wrote the first part of a very intense action sequence and there is something about this cue that is worth noting: it’s very, very intense and it’s not the climax of the movie.

Now, I believe that all action cues in a film should not sound alike and that you should keep some juice in the tank for the big moment, the climax, if you know what I mean.

However, with this scene, I had to be intense. Why? It has to do with the character’s arc and his POV.

In this scene, Silkboy has just arrived in Fantasy Land (that’s the name we give it, but it has no name that I know of) and has just been slapped by a talking flower, smacked and thrown by a bat girl and now is flying through the air pursued by mushrooms trying to kidnap him.

He is confused, panicked and totally not in control of what is happening. The music had to reflect that confusion as well as the action happening.

So the music is fluttering, nervous and panicky, loud and fast, giving a sense of disorientation. It is even a bit scary, but certainly not heroic. That would be wrong for this scene and for that point in the character’s arc.

Later on, as Silkboy gets accustomed to his surroundings and jumps into the action, the music will reflect that.

Now off to bed. The goal is 1′30″ of music tomorrow!

Over the past two days I have been writing the music for the treacherous arrival to Fantasy Land.

By treacherous I don’t mean that the Fantasy Land is treacherous, but rather that the movie itself is hard to score.

In the span of less than two minutes three main characters are introduced, all in a very disjointed style.

The music of course follows that to a certain extent, and changes mood quickly from one shot to the next, very much in the spirit of old Disney shorts while still giving a sense of shape and flow to the images.

I originally thought of writing themes for all three characters, but upon seeing the film it become obvious that there was no time to present anything more than one theme, two at the most.

So two characters, Kego the worm and Anya the bat now share the same theme because in many ways  they shared similar characteristics: goodness and tender relationship with Silkboy.

Lucky the flower gets his own theme because he has a unique character in the film, even though he gets little screen time. It’s a fast, sherzando sort of theme, and we’ll see what I can do with it later!

To show you how crazy this beginning is, film scoring wise, the Kego and Anya gets played scary, comically frenetic and as a lullaby, all in the span of one minute!

But now, seeing it with the music, it’s amazing how much music pulls everything together!

Anyway, back to work. I’m behind schedule, but not by much. The coming scenes should be much easier to score. I knew this arrival in Fantasy Land would be hard.

PS: Q: How many ways can you score someone falling down? A: Lots! (I’m having fun matching the mood of every fall.)

Well, things are going to get busy but I want to keep this diary going, as much for me as for anyone reading this, so from now on I will do very short entries, like this one.

Last week, on Thursday and Saturday, the director David Liu and I edited the film together. Yep, that’s right, and I am getting a credit for it!

What happened is that he asked for my thoughts way back when, and it was hard to explain so I did a little edit of the reel I had.

I didn’t hear anything about it until about a month ago when he phoned and asked me to do the edit again.

So I did, and I did it better, and he loved my ideas! He kept almost all of them in the film, and came down from Shanghai to edit the rest of the film together.

So now I have the film all ready to compose to and that’s what I am doing now.

This morning I wrote the first cue for the fantasy land sequence and now I have to tackle some themes for some fun characters.

• Kego the giant worm
• Lucky the talking flower
• and Anya the bat girl

But the video was very late in coming to me  and therefore my writing schedule is tighter than a nun’s… well, it’s tight… so the themes will need to come fast and furious!

So here we go! This is the homestretch.

I’ll see if I can post some of the mock-ups for those who are interested. Just let me know.

Doing an animated film you have to follow certain conventions like the ones set out by the great composers of the Disney films and Warner shorts, the most well known of which is perhaps Carl Stalling.

Which means I have to follow the action with the music, something referred to as Mickey-Mousing.

Before and during this project, I spent considerable time studying this music: transcribing and playing it on the piano in order to understand it.

But doing exactly that in the film would have been too old-fashioned, so I had to find a way to adapt this style of music to the film.

Here are some of the things I do to make the score more contemporary sounding, while still being a nod to the old style of writing:

• Not treat the music as a sound effect as much as they did on those old ‘toons. I did it a lot of course, but the melodic threads are the primary music ingredients and these are being decorated by the wooshes and splashes rather than those being the primary musical element.

• I am making the music have more form. The changes of mood and melody and tempo in those old cartoons were almost schizophrenic. Of course, I have written moments like that already, but they are the exception and when they happen, they are more effective and funny.

• More chromatic: for the last few cues I wrote I did the Bartok accidental dissonance thing, where I set up individual contrapuntal strands that flowed with their own logic while still working together. There were lots of dissonances, cross-relations and it sounded fantastic: sort of like if Bartok did Mickey-Mouse, and no one will know or care! It will be a fresh sound that will still sound familiar. I am proud of those cues.

That’s it for now. I am meeting the director in less than an hour, so I have to get ready.

Part of the skills of a film composer has to be time management. Creativity on demand, that is the name of the game, and for me it is something I am constantly adjusting and getting better at.

Almost every day I do a little post-mortem; I take note of what went well what didn’t go so well during my writing day. Based on that I try to adjust my approach the next day.

Why do this? It’s in my nature to analyze first of all, but also because it really helps.

Listen, I have to do almost two minutes of music per day, completely orchestrated using pencil and paper on short score.

In order to make sure that the copying of the score goes as smoothly as possible, everything has to be as clean and clear as possible. I also want to make sure I don’t overlook anything on the score; instruments, sections, textures, whatever, it’s easy to overlook details if you don’t have a good work approach.

Having a certain order to my work flow helps me keep the music in focus and avoids me getting lost in the notes.

What’s my approach? Well, today anyway, it looks like this.

1. Watch the scene to score as I build a mental image of the cue as complete as possible. I also split the cue where needed at this time for ease of composition and recording.
2. Set the metronome marking I wish to use while watching the scene, then using my click book I check to see if I can hit easily what I need to hit.
3. Then I play around a bit with the music, usually in my head as I watch the film and once I have a good idea, I play it out on the keyboard roughly still while watching.
4. With a good idea of the music I head over to my paper, lay out my timings and then proceed to jot down the melodic line as quick and neatly as possible, assigning it to the instruments as I go. I might also start sketching the rest then, but only if it comes easy and quick.
5. I do a quick check of my timings with what I wrote. I used to do a quick mock-up at this point using piano, but I have now started to just turn on the metronome, start the scene and sing my music along. That works well and is time efficient. (Also, singing allows my imagination to be more vivid than hearing the timbre of the piano.)
6. I then arrange and orchestrate the cue. Here as well I have laid out some steps to make sure that I do not overlook anything. But I need to get back to work now, so I’ll leave that for another day.
7. Once the cue is written, I do a mock-up by playing each part through.

There you have it.

As you might notice, this approach involves a lot of silence, letting the music grow inside my mind rather than by noodling with sounds at the keyboard. This is quite efficient for me, as I find that the noodling alone is time-consuming, sort of like pecking around to see what works.

It’s funny how it goes; by being patient and not going to the piano or the keys right away, but rather taking the time to listen to the music in my mind, I get things done much, much faster. I mean, it only takes between 5 and 20 minutes to imagine the music, which then allows the process to go pretty quick after that.

Of course, this approach may not be for everyone and certainly not for every project. This is an orchestral score to be played by live musicians, so everything needs notating.

And also, I love the look of a hand-written score on paper. It’s gorgeous!