The Light of Day

Keith scores! (a short film)
KeithHandy posted in Composing on September 17th, 2006

I’m working on my very first film score! It’s for a four-minute animated short by Mike Boas, and I just found out yesterday that his rough cut has already been accepted into a festival, leaving me only about three days to write and record the whole thing. Nothing like a short deadline to force you to get your feet wet!

Although I have many years of experience with composing — this would be extremely difficult if I didn’t — writing to a film is so completely different of an animal. I’m having a lot of fun, but it sure requires a different mindset. Normally I have a gut feeling for how long I want to hold or build up a tension of any kind before releasing it, and I’m totally focused on the kind of chord I’m either playing or implying, and where it would naturally want to go next, and either going there, or figuring out what the “next level” would be. Let’s not mince words here — the groove tells me where to go.

With film scoring, you sometimes have to just hang out in dissonance-land for a while. You have to keep it interesting, but not by way of getting ahead of what’s happening on the screen. Your muse rides shotgun; it can only make suggestions.

Fortunately, the music software I use can open up a movie preview window that stays in sync with my music project, even when I scrub back and forth on the timeline, so I can synchronize any sound to the exact frame something happens. You actually have to be careful to not have too many things line up perfectly, because it can look silly and awkward. I’m sure there are plenty of resources on the web that give professional quallity advice on the art of scoring, but frankly, I DON’T HAVE TIME TO READ THEM RIGHT NOW. Gotta just use my best judgement and get this one in the can.

The film is a take-off on early silhouette animation in the style of Lotte Reiniger, and will be billed as a pretend “restoration project” of an early film based on H. P. Lovecraft’s short story, The Other Gods.

I hope people enjoy it!