In the can and out the door
KeithHandy posted in Composing on September 21st, 2006
Hooray — I finished the soundtrack before the (real, actual, absolute) deadline for the October festival!
The experience was insane but exhilirating. I invited Mike over for a few hours last night to supervise the finishing touches, and there was basically nothing else he could have been doing at the time because he was nervously waiting for his effects to render. In fact, I think it killed a second bird for him by being a healthy distraction.
As I’d posted earlier, I pretty much came up with the ending first and worked backwards. By the time I’d done all but the first scene, I was so far into the eleventh hour that I had to make an emergency raid of my archives for an old and neglected piano piece. I was afraid Mike would think it was all wrong — I felt like I was cheating — but he felt it made a nice contrast to the scarier parts that come up later. It also worked out well in two ways: it ended on the same chord that the second scene began with, and the notes that happened to fall on the title sequence were easily molded into a dramatic old-timey horror intro by doubling them with brass and other instruments.
Mike got a fairly real inside view of my way of working, or actually a time-compressed and “only 80% as perfectionistic as usual” version of it, as I experimented with ways to perform a suitable bass guitar part for the frantic, saucerfulesque mid-section.
The Other Gods will premiere on either October 6th, 7th, or 8th at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon. It looks like there are a lot of other interesting films that will be shown there as well. If you’re reading this, Mike, thanks for the experience and I hope all goes well!
