Well, the score is done. Completed it yesterday morning.

I listened to the whole film with all the music in, and I only have a minor thing that bugged me, the rest was all either fine or fantastic.

So now it is time to finalize traveling arrangements, prepare all the music for the session, click tracks, visual aids for conducting, and practicing my conducting, I plan on doing a great job.

What struck me as I walked out of my studio after I was done this, was that these themes I have been living with for the past while are now on their own.

The themes were like friends after a while, like the characters in the film, and now it is done.

This is an experience I will remember forever, my first big score and one in which I wrote the kind of music I love to write.

Now it’s time for the last leg of the journey, the culmination of all this work: the recording with the Evergreen Orchestra in Taipei, January the 18 to the 25.

11 seconds to go. That’s how much writing I still need to do until the score is done.

Today I completed a cue that had been left for later because the video for it was not final and had to be redone a few times.

For the record (and my own future recollection) the sequence I am referring to was not working well and I redid the editing for the director. It worked great, he loved it and they followed my edit exactly.

As I mentioned before, I will be getting an editing credit for this film, which I think is very cool.

It was great that the director was open to my input and saw that I understand the visual story-telling language enough to make this small contribution to the story. I think it’s fantastic and I was thrilled to do it.

Anyway, so I inserted  my new edited video into the timeline, but now I had a cue before and a cue after and I had to bridge the two.

It was a real puzzle, especially in terms of tempo and form, but it turned out great and seamless, and now I have 11 seconds to go: a Flower Dance for the arrival in Fantasy Land.

Meanwhile, Brad Stark is currently copying the score into Finale like mad to get it ready for the recording sessions. He’s doing a fantastic job. Brad, if you are reading this, I love you man.

Oh, and tonight I sat down with my wife and watched a bit of the film, and I’ll be damned, it’s f@#$ing working and sounds really good.

I think I reached most of the goals I set out to reach for this score.

• Strong, memorable tunes
• Tunes are properly positioned in the film and well developed
• Based on the tradition of cartoon scoring without being overly cliché
• It has a signature sound
• There is architecture to the score
• Good sense of pacing
• Variety of colours and sound, but still keeping things connected and belonging together
• Doesn’t sound like a Hollywood score, and yet feels like film music
• Has traditional harmony and plenty off chromaticism, both triadic and really pure chromatic bordering on Lutoslawsky. (There’s also a fair amount of bi-tonality in there, and polychords abound.)
• And perhaps the most important thing: the music feels alive. (I’ll talk about that later…)

Actually, even some moments that I felt so-so about suddenly sounded wonderful to me after having a few weeks away from them I was able to just listen.

So now time for bed. Maybe I’ll stop dreaming about Silkboy now…

Well, today I have officially less than 10 minutes of score left to write.

It seems not so long I was prepping for the score and now it’s almost done.

This defining moment in my life is quickly coming to a close and I know I will look back upon this with pride at what I pulled off.

An entire feature animated film, a fantasy adventure, with tons of action, fanciful characters and locales and thousands of hits, completely written down the way the great film composers used to do it.

It has been a great journey and I have learned tons about the craft and about myself, but it’s just the beginning. This project set me on my course, that is for sure.

But, what am I doing, reminiscing when the project is not even done! I must head back to work and cross the finish line in style!

Alain

PS: I wrote the cue for the freeing of the goddess of silk today, and the melody and orchestration actually brought a tear to my eye. Very cool.

An action scene is not just an action scene. It is a part of the story. It is a story.

Like Jackie Chan says about his fight scenes, each one has a character and he approaches it as a story, with a beginning and an end.

Well, I am at the point of the climactic action scene and it’s important I get it right, so here’s what I did.

I knew this action scene was many things and I wanted that to be in the music.

• The action here is serious because the fate of the world depends on a successful outcome. So I need to play it serious otherwise it will just be horseplay.
• However, this is an animated film and even with all the seriousness, the fate of the world in the balance and all that, it would be just wrong to play it like a serious action piece in another film. So there’s a fine line to walk here.
• Furthermore, there is a lot of levity peppered throughout this sequence, it is filled with fanciful characters and really crazy things happen.

So yesterday and today I spent some time relaxing and listening to some music that would lead me in the right direction.

I could not find anything that fit, which is great because otherwise why hire me, right?

But just before lunch today, I found the materials I needed that pushed all the right buttons. Having a clear idea of what I needed to achieve with the music (serious and light) it eventually hit me to write octatonic lines supported by major harmony.

I have my “key” now that unlocks the door, and I will spend the rest of the afternoon writing out the theme and fishing for other materials, then tomorrow I will go ahead and write the cues.

Yesterday and today were very important and I have learned to consider this type of preparation as part of the composition process:

I spent time understanding the architecture of the film and what role the music would play. This means I know where I am going and will not just be feeling my way around blindly, note by note without a sense of the big picture. And knowing where you are going is the first step in actually getting there!

I spent time understanding the tone and finding the new musical materials I needed for that. So now that I know where I am going, I have the tools to get there.

My plan is to complete the score by Christmas, the 23rd to be exact, so 12 days to go!

How often can you change moods and how quickly?

That was the question that I posed myself as I worked on this film, and so I looked at the master John Williams for advice, especially his cartoony Indiana Jones scores, including my favourite of the four Indy scores: The Temple of Doom.

The answer is: pretty damn quick.

There are some scenes, like that one in the airplane when the pilots and leave them to crash, or when they are leaving the Indian village to start their journey to Pankot Palace, where the music there is fragmented, changing from theme to theme very quickly, only presenting a bit of one theme then a bit of the other.

I have also realized that this type of fragmented, stop-and-go music happens in scenes that are preparation for action.

And so yesterday I scored a scene that presented many things quickly; running, despair, sadness, reunion, meeting and comedy, all in the span of like 40 seconds or so.

It was a transitory scene that is leading to the longer sections of the ending.

At first I admit I tried to play through the scene and it didn’t work. But when I watched the completed cue with the image, I knew it didn’t work, but I also knew why and how to fix it.

So I followed every part of the scene; started quick and breathless and a bit funny, sad and h0llow winds, then romantic strings have a quick swell (presenting two themes in counterpoint) and then a quick descent into humour before stopping right before the punch line.

This might sound schizophrenic, but here’s the paradox;

• the first cue which was more melodic and musically coherent totally stuck out
• But this more active, “roller coaster” cue with all its ups and downs actually blends seamlessly with the scene since it follows it so well, disappearing in the story even if mixed in loud.

How cool is that!

A new article in Variety online hits the nail on the head about the modern state of film scoring. One of the best, most succinct pieces I have read on the subject.

Read it.

The I ask you, what kind of director are you? One that realizes the power that music and melody can have on the emotional response to your film, or one that thinks no one cares anyway.

Would Psycho have been Psycho, Jaws been Jaws, Indiana Jones been so exciting and The Magnificent Seven been as magnificent without the music?

No. I am sure of it. No.

Oh, they would still have been good films, but music is that magic ingredient that makes everything come alive. Steven Spielberg was right, music is the soul of a movie, and to capture that soul you need a special kind of composer, not someone who, as Richard Bellis says in the Variety Article “selects music.”

You need a composer.

Reaching the final act of the film! Yeah!

I was looking at a scene this morning and going through my spotting notes. I originally had the idea to write some crazy machine-like music for a silk-manufacturing scene in the film.

But now  it’s obvious to me; that’s not the right music.

The right music is dramatic, because this manufacturing is happening because a magical being is trapped and forced to do this.

So the scene is not about those crazy machines making silk as if possessed, the scene is about how they are able to do this magical feat! And that is dramatic.

That is why spotting notes are only a rough guide. Timings change, and as I work I gain a deeper understanding of the film which allows me to score it with more insight.

For example, yesterday I wrote some puzzle-writing music which is not what you would expect.

The music is a foreshadowing of what this puzzle will reveal. What will it reveal? Well, I ain’t saying.

Things are going well, the goal is to get the majority of the music done for Christmas so I can have a day off or two. After that it will be rewrites, fix ups, score preparation with the goal of getting the music to the Evegreen Orchestra early since they offered to run through it first.

Over the past few days I wrote the music for the climactic reveal of the goddess of Silk, Leizu. This was a lot of fun and another dream scoring moment to write music like that.

I wrote this first because I didn’t have the theme for it yet and wanted to build up to it. Now I have the theme and the climax, so today I will write the music that will foreshadow it.

I wish I would have had that video to work with before, because then I would have used that theme before, but I didn’t have it, so I instead opted to go for a mysterioso theme.

So now, I will be able to prepare the entrance of the theme at the big climax only a few times, but that is better than nothing.

Preparing themes is a big thing, and John Williams knows how to do it. I’ve been watching “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom”, quite a brilliant example of using and preparing themes.

Check it out this interesting article a the Hollywood Reporter.

Oh, I also wrote one of my best action set-pieces a few days ago, quite proud of it. I can’t wait to hear the orchestra sweating over this, it’s going to sound great!

A quick note before I go back to work here.

I scored this traveling shot as the main characters fly over a large magical tree world. The music there had to be epic and sweeping, giving a sense of scope and awe to the shots, course, but the characters here are prisoners being taken against their will to a strange place for an unknown purpose.

So the big epic feel also needed to mix in a bit of dread and foreboding.

And I did it pretty good, I must say. Quite happy with that one.

It comes down to knowing:

1. what the story is,
2. what the characters are feeling
3. what is the subtext
4. and what can the music add to the scene that is not painfully obvious

Asking myself these questions is my first part of composition. Sometimes it’s clear and takes only a thought and I am done, other times, I really have to think about it like I mentioned in the previous post.

With this scene (very short scene ) it was easy and I knew what to do and had a great time doing it.

Orchestration note: I tried scoring this scene with mid-high strings and low brass to leave a bit of space in the middle to give a sense of scope. it did feel very wide, but it lacked the “awe” and “epic” parts by not being rich enough. So in came the horn and trumpet chords to fill out the middle.

Here was the challenge of the past few days:

Characters are introduced which at first everyone believes to be very bad guys, but they turn out to be quite playful and cool characters.

So the music had to create that tension. Seems easy enough, but this element of fear was only partially presented and certain aspects of the dialog were playful which contradicted the general mood, making it harder to score.

So my job was to make sure that the subtext of the scene (fear and dread) was clear while not completely contradicting the playfulness.

Not an easy task and even though the solution was simple, it took me a while to get at it…

before that I wrote a funny solo piano and violin variation on the main baddie’s theme while he puts on this big weepy act for Silkboy and his partners. Really funny and gets me smiling.

Like Henry Mancini said “sometimes you really know when you nail a scene” – or something like that – and that was one of those times for sure.

I also wrote a few seconds of a dramatic and epic and magical reveal of a big city in the trees which had a lot of potential. I wish I could have had more than a few seconds for that musical idea to play out, and the scene also felt short. But they have to keep the length of the film down for costs and distribution, so things get cut.

Anyway, back to work. I spent the morning figuring out how to get better timings with Cubase 5 when doing variable clicks. I think it will be helpful, although I was reticent to make use of this new technology, instead going for free timing.

I’ll use both: variable clicks and streamers.