I’ve done two more film projects recently, and again, worked entirely in a software only environment. I’m really pleased with this, although I am starting a new film now that will incorporate a few of my favorite older synths as well. While I adore all my newest plug-ins, they don’t replace everything I have and love from my dark and mysterious past. And as I do more in this way, I look for whatever makes both my writing process and the sound quality of the music better. Recently I explained how I turned 3 MOTU 2408 interfaces into a low cost, low latency Lightpipe patchbay to combine and route the digital audio in my studio. Works great (details on the web site). I also added some additional Digidesign DSP and Lighpipe I/O in order to build a larger virtual mixer inside Logic with EQ and dynamics on each channel as needed. As I no longer have a standard mixer in my studio, all my external audio, keyboards and Gigastudios, enters Logic through the ProTools interfaces and are mixed in the virtual mixer. Works great.
Among the projects I have done recently were a couple of smaller films. One was a film entitled Shelter Island starring Stephen Baldwin, Chris Penn, and Patsy Kensit , by first time director Geoff Schaff. In addition to it being done entirely in software it also had two other unusual aspects. First it was an opportunity to collaborate with my good friend and brilliant composer/guitarist Michael Brook (Canada, in the house!!). There’s nothing novel about a score collaboration, but we did it in a unique way. After watching the movie together with the director and talking about the general approach, Michael and I selected a few keys and tempos, and then each wrote several cues in those keys and tempi, not to picture and not together. In fact we did not listen to the other’s music until after they were finished and mixed. We each gave our pieces to our music editor Richard Henderson, who put all of it into ProTools and then built musical montages from pieces that were never written together. The results were more than gratifying. Musical materials neither of us would considered putting together flowed perfectly.
And so the score was created in just this way. Each of us worked on themes and moods that we could imagine going with certain scenes. But we decided not to tell our music editor all of what we had in mind for the music. This gave him tremendous freedom to create a soundtrack based on what we wrote, but not exact orders for what would go where. Not only was it a fun challenge for him, but allowed the music to have a purely musical flow, not tied into the ‘hits’ of the picture.
Once the music was put to picture we all sat together to see how the score was shaping up. In some scenes we put more than one cue, so the director might have some choices in the event he didn;t like the first idea. The score was screened for the director. Some cues stuck and a few went south. Michael and I stayed away from some of the playback sessions just to make for a more level playing field. Generally it worked well. The score came together quickly, and only a few cues needed to be rewritten to picture for the director to be satisfied.
Michael Brooks incomparable guitar playing is his sonic signature in most everything he does. I need to try harder. I typically begin any project by creating the pallet of sounds I will use to write. This was no exception. The temp score had pieces by both Michael and myself. There was a piece by Michael that really intrigued me with a beautiful calm metallic rhythm. He told me that he had a percussionist play a set of metal salad bowls with his fingers. There was something I really liked about that. I marched into Michael’s kitchen and took the bowls. Back at my studio, I recorded the bowls very carefully. I put a kit together of tapping the metal bowls which I used heavily throughout the score.
Another film I worked on recently is from director Mark Pellington, which whom I worked on The Mothman Prophesies about a year earlier. He had taken on the making of a short film to test a new high end video camera. The film grew to about 45 minutes in length, with the need for about 20 or 25 minutes of music. For this I did a very different score.
I’ve been experimenting with extreme time stretching of orchestral recordings to create unusual but highly tonal textures. And that became an important element to this score, which has a dark, dreamlike quality to it. There are a number of tools available to do audio timestretching, each with a somewhat different sound quality. It’s worth trying a few out.
Because of the experimental nature of this film, I decided to be a bit more experimental myself and so I finally fired up Logic’s surround sound functions and all I can say is ‘wow!’. I wouldn’t use it for most projects I do, but being able to surround pan you elements is such a joy. I had just put in an M-Audio powered surround speaker system into my writing room, so it was great to be able to place sounds into the 5.1 environment.
Clips from these two scores are on the web site www.reelworld-online.com. Also, there was a mistake in a recent column about the address of a web site dedicated to plug-in synths. The correct address is www.kvr-vst.com. Check it out.