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.

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.