A THOUSAND ROADS

Greetings to you all, and happy new year! I’ve been off for a few months while busily scoring a number of TV and film projects. In the coming months I hope to bring you up to speed on some of them, as well as how some new tech has influenced them, and me. I also will be going into more details about life in the treacherous, wonderful, political and always artistically challenging Reel World.

I’m currently finishing up a film I am co-scoring with Australian composer/diva Lisa Gerrard. “A Thousand Roads” is a film for the new Smithsonian Museum of Native Americans in Washington D.C. The museum has a special large screen theater with a new state of the art digital projection system and 7.1 surround sound. Native American film director Chris Eyre (“Smoke Signals”, “Skins”) as well as the film’s producers wanted a score that, while reflecting the aura and sensibilities of native American music, maintained a deeply universal theme. The producers had the idea of Lisa Gerrard from her score to “Whale Rider” and the music of Dead Can Dance. Lisa wanted a collaboration with me from scores of mine she had heard (we had met years before while both working on “Gladiator”).

Lisa lives in a remote town in Australia, while I live in Los Angeles, where the film was being produced and edited. The process began with a copy of the film, still in the rough stages of editing, being sent to me. It is a very poetic and visual film, with many amazing time-lapse images of American landscapes from Alaska to Peru blended with four very personal human stories. These were just touched upon in the script. In fact, it’s my opinion that scripts tend to be of little use to a composer, since the style we use for scoring a film can be based as much on the cinematography and editing as on elements of plot and dialogue.

In the past I have almost always been forced to view films using VHS tapes. Avid editing systems, used on about 90% of films and television, don’t have the ability to output QuickTime (QT) files, Don’t ask me why, since 90% of composers and sound editors use QuickTime for video in their software. This film was edited on Apple’s Final Cut Pro, which (not surprisingly) does support QT. Avids also don’t support creating video with visual timecode – the onscreen SMPTE numbers that we need to sync our sequencers and audio workstations to a QT movie.

A frame from the movie’s QT file with timecode numbers in the upper right corner.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I was sent a copy of the movie on a DVD ROM with a “DV” QuickTime file. The DV format is of relatively high resolution, and avoids much of the blotchy artifacts of more compressed video formats. DV files are compatible on most any sequencer or audio editing system that supports digital video.

I met with the director and producers of the film for a spotting sessions to discuss the style and placement of music for the film. This was also my first real introduction to the vast array of Native American music. While I had a couple of CDs of native flute and powwow recordings, I knew little of the music of specific geographic regions. This became important throughout project because while this was not to be a strictly ‘native’ score, it did need to reflect the regional diversity within native American music. Vocal, flute and drumming styles are linked more with their geographic origins than the specific tribe or nation. So music from the Pacific Northwest has a recognizable style different from anything from the Southwest, which differs from Alaskan or Canadian music. I listened to a wide range of native music and became familiar with a number of important recordings.

There are some wonderful recordings of native American music. Here is a sampling of some diverse offerings, many of which were inspirational to the project: R. Carlos Nakai Ulali Canyon Records Douglas Spotted Eagle John Trudell Black Lodge Primeaux and Mike Smithsonian Folkways

A couple of weeks later, with a copy of the film in near final edit, I got on a plane for Australia to set up with Lisa at her home studio.

For the first time I felt I could score a film entirely on my laptop computer. I brought my Apple G4 Powerbook and an external Firewire hard drive on which I had my entire sample and loop library. The movie was on the internal drive so as to not push the limits of the Firewire bus too much. Although we planned to work with several Native American performers, I had a copy of Q-Up Arts’ “Voices of Native America” (Vol 1 and 2) sample CDs and organized a lot of it for my sampler (Logic’s own EXS24 and Native Instruments Kontakt). These samples proved invaluable throughout the project.

I have converted almost my entire sample library to be used by these samplers, and only go back to using additional external samplers on very large scale scores needing the additional polyphony. This film required strings, harp, some light synth work, and a bevy of Native drums, flutes, and voices. The G4 could handle this and the video with ease.

I set up the laptop with a simple MIDI keyboard and an M-Audio FireWire 1814. Lisa ran Nuendo on her Windows PC along with two GigaStudio systems and an Akai S5000 (see fig. 1). We both sent our audio outputs to a Digidesign ProTools system to monitor and mix. A single MIDI cable sent MIDI Clock from her system to mine in order to get them to run together in sync. After setting this up, I’m pleased to say it ran perfectly the first time, and never failed. With this setup in place either of us could begin a sketch of a cue and share it with the other. We decided to put audio onto her Nuendo box at first, so she could edit her vocals when needed. So I played many of my flutes and whistles to her system as well, and then transferred them to mine afterward via Ethernet LAN, which also worked the first time we tried it (hurray for OS X, by the way).

By this simple system we could exchange audio files, MIDI Files, video, or family photos. A wonderful method of collaboration.

With this in place we began composing the score. Each cue began from one of us coming up with some sort of germ or sketch. At times I would unplug my output and work with headphones to bring an idea up for Lisa to hear. Likewise Lisa had a number of ideas that she played for me to add something onto. And so it went for nine days or so. A cue would be discussed and started by one of us. We recorded Lisa’s voice and my woodwinds on many of the cues. Sampled Native American phrases and songs were used throughout, though some would be replaced later by live singers. All of this done to the QT video.

As we began to complete cues, we wanted to send them back to America for comments by the film’s director and producers. I have an FTP server which we used to upload AIFF files of each cue. I’ve been using the Mac shareware program Cyberduck for uploading and downloading files to and from my server. As we saved each cue, we would name it with it’s unique timecode. Thus the third cue was called “M3 Alaska 01.09.12.18.” My partner back in L.A. downloaded each file from us and put them into Logic so that they would line back up with the picture. A meeting was arranged for everyone to come to my LA studio to watch and listen to the sketches.

Not unexpectedly there was both good and bad news from the first playback. It is especially hard to convey ones ideas from a remote location. Demos don’t always speak for themselves. Some ideas are finished, but others are rough. A real orchestra is planned and will make a big difference. The replacement of samples by players too makes a huge difference. When you are in the room together it is easy to interject these thoughts in between cues or even in between notes. Not so in this case.

But in short order we knew just what was needed to complete the score. A few days later I flew back to LA and played the next batch of sketches and fixes myself to the producers, and the response was much, much better. The score went through a few more days of revision and was then ready to record. This involved two recording sessions. One for the orchestra and one for Ulali, a very well known Native American vocal group.

For the orchestra we recorded the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. We arranged for a live hookup between Los Angeles and Bratislava, Slovakia where the session was happening. A special encoder/decoder box is used on both ends of a pair of ISDN phone lines for best possible quality and no dropouts – a typical problem with internet chats. This system allowed me to listen to the recording session with very high fidelity – about as good as an iPod. I have a talkback button that can be heard by the conductor and the engineer. We had sent ProTools sessions with a click track and stereo demos of the cues to Bratislavsa a few days beforehand. In 4 hours we had recorded the entire orchestral portion of the score with stunning results. A hard drive with the orchestra tracks was sent back to L.A. via FedEx. A final session was arranged with the singers with I was able to record directly to my laptop. All the final tracks were transferred back to my studio computer for final polish and tweeks, and the score was mixed in glorious surround in ProTools.

This project was a wonderful blend of contemporary on-the-go composition and recording techniques with the organic and traditional sounds of Native American music, orchestral colours, wood flutes, voices, and the lyrical sound of Lisa Gerrard’s stunning voice. The film will be projected as a permanent exhibit of the Smithsonian starting in April 2005 in Washington D.C.

AUDIO CLIPS COMING SOON.....