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…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 2:11 am and is filed under Animated feature diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.