Music Goofs in Soundtracks - Lost, Season 4 Finale Part I

Blooper pages rarely mention music goofs. But they're a constant danger, because producers sometimes have to live with imperfections to stay on budget.

Last month I visited a recording session for a network show, and 20 minutes in, I noticed persistent audio distortion in the monitors. As a visitor, I had the sense to stay out of the way of folks working. Soon enough, the sound editor noticed the problem, and the group discovered the distortion was going to tape.

One very stressful hour later, the problem was solved (by replacing the wireless headphones in the percussion section). Everything was re-recorded and sounded great, but the session went overtime.

They very nearly could have decided to let the distortion stay. It wasn't that bad, and the audience wouldn't really notice.

So how often do real-world glitches happen?

Consider part I of the Lost season 4 series finale - I think I can hear a wrong note in the trombones...can you?

Click on the Lost season 4 finale episode and cue the playback to exactly 41:00 (you will have to wait for a pre-roll ad). The cue starts when Ben says "I always have a plan". It's majestic and sweeping (great stuff as usual from Michael Giacchino). Listen to the trombones playing whole notes. The video shows the different groups converging on the Orchid station. Right at 42:02, there is a shot from behind Ben (his hands are up). This is where you will hear 2 trombones disagreeing on a note:


I thought for a moment this was intentional, like the situation was going to go all dissonant and creepy, but it quickly recovers to a half-cadence, so my theory is it's a blip.

So...can you hear it? Or does it sound fine to you? Does it even matter? And have you ever noticed any other musical glitches?

"Oops I Did it Again" Written as a Fugue for Piano

This video actually contains a detailed analysis of writing a fugue, but I find it gets a little academic and hard to follow...but the fugue itself (starts about 2/3rds of the way through) is actually kind of nice, I'd like to hear it performed on a large organ, though:

Jumping the Shark, Scoring the Jump

If you attend a talk by an experienced Hollywood composer sometime, you might hear an opinion that film scoring is currently in a "cool" period.

In film after film, the basic rule seems to be that composers avoid displaying any trace of enthusiasm in their music. A certain detachment from the material is essential.

Take a 70s TV scene, such as Fonzie jumping the shark, and you hear the difference right away (notice, by the way, the cute homage to John William's famous 2-note motive from "Jaws", in the lower brass):



Audiences today have been so overexposed to media that they're hyper-sensitized to storytelling conventions. So if you make the mistake of saying too much in the music, you're insulting them, so they just think you're corny.

That's not a bad thing by any means...I myself feel distracted by hyperactivity in old film scores, even ones where the music is clearly a masterpiece.

(Ironically, the music from Jaws, also from the 70s, doesn't sound the least bit dated at all...)

Is it Sesame Street or Transformers?

"The Geometry of Circles" is an old Phillip Glass-scored Sesame Street cartoon that folks seem to have loved as kids. It spooks the heck out of me (as minimalist music always seems to) . If I'd seen it at the age of 3 I would have had nightmares.

Still, it's brilliant, check out the first 30 seconds, especially the 2-note repetitions, to get the idea:




Watching Transformers, the Decepticons music reminded me of it. Getting past the movie's booming percussion, dark tones and gigantic reverb, it shares the same minimalist techniques - repetitive rhythms and stark arpeggios. And in particular, a 2-note motive.

I sort of wondered - maybe this choice was the composer's way of keeping the story kid-like? Transformers are toys, after all, and I related to it like one of my childhood fantasies. Why not use minimalism to suggest the absolute clarity of good guys vs. bad guys?

Can you hear the similarity? Listen to the vocals starting about 1:30 into this remix:



So is this theory right? Here's what the composer Steve Jablonsky has to say about it:

The Decepticon theme was an experiment. I had no idea if it would work, but as soon as I heard the choir sing the first few bars, I was happy. It's not really a theme that you can whistle. It's more of an evil chant. I wanted it to feel somewhat ancient, and I had a lot of fun with it.

OK, Sesame Street isn't much of a source of ancient evil chants. So there goes that theory.

Still, I'd say he hit the mark.

"Enchanted" song composer Alan Menken on BlogTalkRadio Dec 4th, 1pm

On the podcast he'll talk about the songs for "Enchanted" and other Disney movies he's done.

Great Moments in Film Scoring, Part III: You've Never Heard a Jingle Like This Before

Sometimes it pays to avoid being too trendy.

The year is 1983.

You're the ad agency creative director on a commercial for the new Corvette.

You tell the composer:

- Take one part Queen's theme from Flash Gordon.

- Add one part Survivor's theme from Rocky III.

- Add synthesizers to highlight the "high tech" features of the car.

Voila!

(Pardon the iFilm embed, this has been booted from YouTube, I promise its worth it...)

Via Amazon's car blog:

The Making of Steinway L1037

Film composers rely on a lot of sample libraries, with good reason. But you can't really create the sound of a real piano with samples (it gets about as close as Diet Coke gets to Coke).

Then there's the piano itself, and many will say there is no comparison to a Steinway.

The Steinway company has had some ups and downs lately. Despite the cute stock symbol, there have been some union strikes, and they're competing against cheaper overseas products. Most of all it's just plain hard to find a growth market in $100,000 pianos. Steinway sales are down 7% this year, and they're just barely making up the shortfall with their cheaper Essex pianos.

Maybe this "Making of Steinway L1037" documentary will turn things around. I've always heard that Steinway has an amazing, complicated production process, this film documents it.

While I'm sure it will show up on the Discovery Channel someday, if you live in New York you can catch it November 20th.




Reviews appear to be quite good....

From Locutus of Borg to Family Guy

Ron Jones seems to have avoided typecasting - he was well-known to Trek fans during the glory days of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when he scored the Best of Both Worlds cliffhanger where Picard was turned into a Borg. Damn that was good stuff.

Now he's sharing composing duties on Family Guy. From the New York Times:

Since its debut in 1999 “Family Guy” has developed a comedic voice as recognizable for its rapid-fire references to pop-culture detritus as for Mr. Murphy’s and Mr. Jones’s lavish arrangements of satirical show tunes. For the premiere of the series’s second season Mr. Jones composed an elaborate parody of “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here” from the musical “Annie” for a scene in which the protagonist Peter Griffin learns that he’s inherited a mansion from a dead relative. The song (whose vaguely obscene title cannot be printed here) was nominated for an Emmy in 2000.

Animation seems to have the best music on TV these days - The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy all feature orchestral arrangements, plus their fair share of schmaltzy musical numbers.

The music for the comedies always plays it straight. The more authentic the music, the better the setup for the jokes (especially the dirty ones).

Many composers lament the timidity and low budgets of TV scores these days. But there are diamonds in the rough, especially that unnamed musical number mentioned above, which was called "This House is Freaking Sweet". (By the way, how is that too dirty to print? Who's the editor of that column anyway?)

This song is freakin' sweet - brings me right back to playing string bass in the orchestra pit of many a Cole Porter musical:

Variety's Bee Movie Review - How about that score?

Lest any emerging film composers overestimate their importance on a film, see the final 7 words of this 650-word review of Bee Movie in Variety:

"Voicings by an array of top talent are fun, and musical backing provides some bounce."

It ain't like being a pop star...George Michael, however, provides some bounce to the trailer:

Is It "Game Over" for Classical Music?

A review of 3 books on the subject in The New Republic laments at length. Here's an excerpt:

The discourse supporting classical music so reeks of historical blindness and sanctimonious self-regard as to render the object of its ministrations practically indefensible. Belief in its indispensability, or in its cultural superiority, is by now unrecoverable, and those who mount such arguments on its behalf morally indict themselves. Which is not to say that classical music, or any music, is morally reprehensible. Only people, not music, can be that. What is reprehensible is to see its cause as right against some wrong.

The article is an energetic analysis of classical music's position in American culture in the 20th century. The upshot seems to be is that classical music's defenders see any attempt to cater to the audience as dumbing-down, and therefore bad. This attitude alienates potential new fans.

It's too bad. But it's easy to see why audiences aren't attracted to the classical music product.

Visiting the web site of an NYP, BSO, or SFS, you'll find white bow ties, wine-tasting events, and invitations to "experience the lush, romantic virtuosity of Rachmaninoff". It's all so very, very...refined.

Compare this to the raucous delight of the audience at Video Games Live, an upstart series of concerts featuring video game music:



Sure, a big part of the fun is the pop-culture irony. But these concerts also feature music from more recent games that takes itself quite seriously. And the audience does as well.

The attraction is obvious. It's the gentle childhood memories of Frogger and Donkey Kong. Or the immersive fantasy worlds of Halo and Zelda. People have spent a lot of time with this music and internalized it with fond memories.

It's much harder for the audience to develop a connection to that lush, romantic virtuosity of Rachmaninoff.

If this trend plays out like blogging vs. the MSM, we might see upstart orchestras like VGL compete rather seriously against the "MSS" (mainstream symphonies). Not only stealing away the audience, but also the performers. Now that could get rather interesting.

How John Williams Connected with George Lucas

John Williams has been doing some concerts around the country, conducting orchestras playing a suite of his film music. He did an interview for a Columbus Ohio arts paper ("The Other Paper") and the interview has some interesting nuggets.

On being introduced to George Lucas:

How did your partnership with Steven Spielberg begin?

I’d been working at Universal Studios for about six or seven years in the television department. An executive rang me up and said, “I’d like you to have lunch with this kid. We think he’s very talented. He’s got a picture called The Sugarland Express that he did with Goldie Hawn, and we think it’s brilliant—brilliantly edited, in particular. Would you like to meet him?”

So I met him. He was really a youngster at that time, only about 23 years old. But he invited me to do that film, which I did, and we’ve been together 35 years now.

After The Sugarland Express, did he say that he wanted you to be his composer for life? When did that arrangement become clear to the both of you?

It still hasn’t. (Laughs.)

Many successful film composers basically rose together with successful directors. Young directors should be on the lookout for a composer to become part of the "team", a big part of the success is the ability the work together and trust each other.

For more about what movies John Williams likes, and progress on the new Indiana Jones score, read the whole thing.

Great Moments in Film Scoring, Part II - 70s TV Logos

If you're old enough to have played an Atari 2600, then you're old enough to know 90% of these old TV-logo intros and signoffs from the 70s and 80s.

The classic logo-music of all time is of course NBC's "bing-boing-bing" chimes, (unfortunately not included in the YouTube emebed below). Just 3 notes. It's all you need to brand a network.

Somewhere along the way, though, it seems that log-music producers started trying to top each other. Music had to be "cutting edger", "forward looking", and "aspirational". It was the 70s, outer space was big, so everything had lots of synthesizers and reverb. Logo music was as it you were trying to score the Apollo moon landing in 5 seconds.

Too bad more log-music producers didn't try a Star Wars-eqsue symphonic approach, instead we got creepy sound effects and synthesizers. But they do bring back memories!

Footage of the Original Star Wars Scoring Session

Directors know how important it is that the scoring orchestra really get into the film's character and theme. Apparently George Lucas and John WIlliams decided to take this concept to the extreme - here is some unearthed footage of the original 1977 Star Wars final scoring session London...

Mastering for your soundtrack's source music

A successful composer gave me advice to hire a mastering engineer for my demo album, because if mastering were easy to do yourself, well, the world wouldn't have any mastering engineers.

I'm taking the advice, and before hiring an engineer, I'm reading "Mastering: The Art and Science" by Bob Katz of Digital Domain. It was recommended to me as a sort of bible for mastering, and reading it I would agree.

Let's say you're a film director and you want to use a friend's band for some of the music. It's an inexpensive option, the song fits your story, but lacks that full professional sound of say, a Fall Out Boy.

A surprising number of bands don't consider mastering for their demo albums, which can greatly improve their sound. At the very least, ask the band how their project has been mastered. If not, they may be willing to spend the money to add that polish, since after all, it is their demo, and it will improve the fit and finish of your film when you show it.

Why hire a mastering engineer? Bob Katz has an article about this. It's long, but here are some excerpts about why a band should master their album:

1. Ear Fatigue
Some mixes may be done at 2 o'clock in the morning, when ears are fatigued, and some at 12 noon, when ears are fresh. The result: Every mix sounds different, every tune has a different response curve.
...
2. The Skew of the Monitors
The result: your mixes are compromised. Some frequencies stand out too much, and others too little.
...
5. The Perspective of another Trained Ear. The Buck Stops Here.
The Mastering engineer is the last ear on your music project. He can be an artistic, musical, and technical sounding board for your ideas.
...
7. Don't Try This at Home
We've found many DAWs and digital mixers that deteriorate the sound of music, shrink the stereo image and soundstage, and distort the audio.
...
Those are only some of the reasons why, inevitably, further mastering work is needed to turn your songs into a master, including: adjusting the levels, spacing the tunes, fine-tuning the fadeouts and fadeins, removing noises, replacing musical mistakes by combining takes (common in direct-to-two track work), equalizing songs to make them brighter or darker, bringing out instruments that (in retrospect) did not seem to come out properly in the mix.

Rolling Stone on the Record Industry's Decline

Ah, what could have been. In the heyday of Napster, I would download singles I would never have paid for - goofy songs like Cher's "I Believe". And the fun could have continued for $10 a month. The record company's held a secret meeting with the Napster CEO in 2000:

Seven years ago, the music industry's top executives gathered for secret talks with Napster CEO Hank Barry. At a July 15th, 2000, meeting, the execs -- including the CEO of Universal's parent company, Edgar Bronfman Jr.; Sony Corp. head Nobuyuki Idei; and Bertelsmann chief Thomas Middelhof -- sat in a hotel in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Barry and told him that they wanted to strike licensing deals with Napster. "Mr. Idei started the meeting," recalls Barry, now a director in the law firm Howard Rice. "He was talking about how Napster was something the customers wanted."

The idea was to let Napster's 38 million users keep downloading for a monthly subscription fee -- roughly $10 -- with revenues split between the service and the labels.

But ultimately, despite a public offer of $1 billion from Napster, the companies never reached a settlement.

Now album sales are down from 785 million albums in 2000 to 588 million in 2006; record stores are closing; laid-off workers are polishing their LinkedIn profiles; and ringtones and iTunes are not making up the shortfall (let alone restoring growth).

The article points many fingers, but it's a familiar business-school case study: incumbent players are pressured by distribution relationships to prevent the growth of cheaper channels.

As for record company execs: they may be criticized as ostriches, but they have weak strategic power. When your main suppliers - the talent - can demand "no-look" clauses in their contracts, and your main distributor is Wal-Mart, you're vulnerable. The Internet has created a new distribution channel, and the incumbent suppliers and distributors has every interest in pressuring the record companies to fight the tidal wave.

The next middlemen to suffer? Certainly the TV and cable networks. Expensive talent, and powerful distributors (Wal-Mart for DVDs, Comcast for cable).

It's only a matter of time when some talent decides to take VC money to produce a show the quality of Lost, 24, or Grey's Anatomy and distribute it all directly to consumers. The cost of creating a TV series is surprisingly close to the average series B round. And the ROI timeline is similar as well.

How soon before private equity starts raising money to fund David Chase or Darren Star to create an all-Internet TV series?

Which business is worth more? A YouTube? Or a business card printer?

If you said "business card printer", you'd be right!

VistaPrint, the online business cards company, is now worth $1.64B. YouTube sold to Google for just $1.6B.

So can we expect to see VistaPrint founders on the cover of Time and Newsweek? Well, no...

But it goes to show, you don't have to be in the slick businesses to have a wildly successful startup.

Great Moments in Film Scoring, V. I: Shake Hands with Danger

A heat-drenched landscape coughs up dust. A bulldozer belches exhaust. And a lazy blues guitar is heard strumming in the pounding heat.

A worker climbs on the bulldozer's gears, failing to realize his life is at risk...

Yes, it's "Shake Hands with Danger", an industrial safety film produced for Caterpillar from the 70s (via BoingBoing).

The music is inspired by the darkest of songs from the man in black, Johnny Cash. Lots of reverb, exposed blues melody lines, languid pauses between phrases - the perfect mood for working hard in the heat and losing two fingers because you weren't careful.

Don't miss it when the foreman says "What if he bumped that control by accident? You'd be mincemeat by now!" (Has anyone really said "mincemeat" since 1975?)



"Shake Hands with Danger
Meet a guy who ought to know
I used to laugh at safety
Now they call me...three-fingered Joe

Shake hands with danger
Find it anywhere you choose
Be careless for a moment
Spend a lifetime with the blues."

Rejected WiiPlay Games

Paperwork Mario, Cii-Section, and SealHunt - proetty politcally incorrect, but still, wish I got to do the score for this one... ;-)

Nielsen SoundScan Data for 2006

The National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) had its annual convention a couple of weeks ago, and Chris Muratone and Rob Sisco of SoundScan gave an overview presentation of Soundscan data from 2006.

The data is fascinating. Think music is heading to the long tail? Well 89% of all albums released in 2006 (by indies and majors) sold fewer than 1000 units. 74% sold fewer than 100 units.

So if you crack the top 11% of all artists, keep your album production expenses under $5000, and earn $5 an album, you can break even. Earn $10 an album and you're making $5000.

There are many more fun facts in the deck (just don't read it in slide show mode - too many animation effects in it...)

Are TV Theme Songs a Dying Breed?

The Hartford Courant wonders whether the super-short musical intros to Lost, Seinfeld, and Ugly Betty are a sign of TV theme songs dying out:

So, obviously, people like TV themes. Why don't network executives? They've been trying to kill them off since the 1990s, when "Seinfeld" opened with a funky - but very quick - bass line.

Bob Thompson, professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, blames it on network consultants fretting over viewers' itchy remote fingers.

"The idea was that you had to immediately close in your audience like quicksand, and a theme song that would provide nothing new was an invitation to check out other channels," Thompson says.

Sure, sales execs are going to fight for another 30 seconds of commercial time to sell each week. But I can't agree with the article. Theme songs are thriving. American Idol, CSI, Battlestar Galactica, House, and The Office - plus anything on in late night - all have prominent themes.

The article laments that Ugly Betty devotes a scant 11 seconds to Jeff Beal's theme. But Lost's theme song - basically a few seconds of interesting sound design - is essential to the show's atmosphere. (Really, can you imagine anything else? Try this alternative Lost theme song on for size. Not quite the same, is it?)

Whatever the length, TV themes are still essential to establishing both the storytelling atmosphere and the "brand" of their shows. Seinfeld's bass-and-beatboxing and the 60 Minutes stopwatch may not be as musically complete as Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance or Mendelssohn's Wedding March, but they are just as indelible.

Know Your Traditional Chinese Instruments

For film makers needing a score with traditional Chinese instruments, here's a site to do quick research on Chinese instruments. Spend a few minutes here and you'll soon pass the quiz to identify the Er-Hu vs. the Liuqin, or the Dizi vs. the Bawu. You'll recognize nearly all the sounds from movies you've seen.

(The site is Melody of China, a San Francisco-based Chinese musical group. They also have their own Chinese-music web links.

Yahoo/Microsoft, iGoogle, and Ask's Rebranding

There's so much going on in search engine land right now I can't help but make a couple of comments:

• Microsoft buying Yahoo! Well...maybe, maybe not. But YHOO's up 18%. The new company would have 2 search engines, 2 ad systems, 2 email platforms, 2 IM systems, 2 video sites, 2 music services....it would be the Noah's Ark of the Internet. Integration will be a long series of painful battles: Panama or AdCenter? FreeBSD or Windows? Flickr or...ok, maybe Flickr. But who gets to be the VP of Widgets? All this will distract attention from product development and end users. Bulking up doesn't normally go with less bureaucracy and faster decision making, things both companies need to catch the next rising Facebook or YouTube.
  

• A friend asked "Why did Google change to iGoogle? Is this one of their home page doodles?" Sure enough, people are griping online - the meanest is a user named "RX Maverick" calling Google "some teenage girl that wants to fit in". Google said the Personalized Home page is their fastest growing product, even faster than the gangbusters YouTube. So if it ain't broke, why fix it? Didn't "Froogle" show that tweaking the Google brand can create confusion? Aren't iPrefixes Apple's bag? Anyway, if you don't like the iGoogle logo change, tell them here.
  

• Reading about Ask.com's perpetual self-re-branding brings sweet but painful memories of my AltaVista days. Talking up and improved algorithm (it's from..."Jersey"), rolling out silly ad agency slogans (AltaVista "smart is beautiful", Ask has "I was all algorithm-ed out"), and making radical brand changes (AltaVista went from mountains to colons, Ask from butlers to anarchists). In AltaVista's case, everyone ended up getting new jobs. Is Ask heading down the same road?
  

Mixing Mistakes to Avoid

So you're doing your demo, and if you don't have it mixed well, people will reject you as a loser after hearing 5 seconds of it. So here are some mistakes to avoid.

The first is mastering your own stuff. A successful composer recently told me: there's a reason why people are mastering engineers. If it was easy to do, the world wouldn't have mastering engineers. Besides, you probably don't own the gear you need to do the job well.

Yes, hiring someone can be expensive, but there are places online which work cheap. MasteringCafe is a Warsaw-based mastering house, they'll master a track for $40. (considering they probably spend a few hours on a track, that's $15 an hour, which ain't bad in Warsaw). Are they any good? Your call - their demos are here.

OK, so the second biggest demo mistake is making a bad mix. OK, so there are a billion sub-mistakes in that one but the MasteringCafe guys have a tidy list of the basic mistakes to avoid, covering short, specific tips on things like mixdown, levels and compression. Enjoy!

Scoring for Video Games - Composer Tom Salta

Tom Salta won an MTV Music Award for his score to the game G.R.A.W. I happen to like Tom's music, he has a solo techno album under the name Atlas Plug, and music for the game Red Steel on iTunes (here's a IGN review). Red Steel has a style that mixes Hollywood scoring, techno, and taiko (call it "taikno", perhaps?).

Anyway, Tom's doing a seminar in Boston this weekend about scoring video games. A big part of it is dealing with how your music needs to change with the action.

Here's a mini preview, from a video of him on FragDolls:

"(in video games) the music has to adapt to what is going on...it could shorten, it could lengthen, it could go here, here, here...there's a lot of technical considerations."

Tom's seminar "The Art, Craft, and Business of Scoring Video Games" is Saturday the 28th in Boston, you can register online.

Working the Web for Elgar with Google Suggest

Sometimes Google products are useful in ways you don't expect, and they can help you accomplish musical research in clever ways.

I've been doing research based on recommendations of a composer whose talk I attended a few weeks ago. One happened to be to listen to the composer Elgar.

Elgar's most famous for "Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1" (played at US high school graduations). OK, fine. But I wanted to know - what are his most distinctive works in the literature?

I tried Wikipedia and the Elgar society's web site. But these sources both provided only comprehensive, chronological catalogs of his works.

It'd be nice if someone had a database of the past programs of all the major symphonies in the world. I'd check the data on what's performed most often. No luck there.

So by accident I discovered that the auto-suggest in the Google search box in Firefox gave me these suggestions:
elgar cello concerto
elgar electronics
elgar enigma variations
elgar society
elgar nimrod
elgar violin concerto
elgar pomp and circumstance

It turns out Nimrod is one of the Enigma Variations. And there's an electronics company called Elgar. They make power sources.

After a little more research, I decided the Cello concerto and Enigma variations it is!

Michael Giacchino Podcast on Lost

TV Squad has a nice summary of a new Lost video podcast where Michael Giacchino gives a tour of the soundstage and the process for scoring Lost:

Lost video podcast recap

Of note is the orchestra instrumentation - 4 trombone players, strings, percussion, harp, piano. No woodwinds or higher brass. The choice of instrumentation can give a show its unique sound.

Also note that Giacchino composes for each scene before even watching the next one. This apparently is to give more of a "What the hell?" feeling to the music - he doesn't know where things are going, so the music can give the audience even more of a feel of being jerked around.

Annoyingly, the video is not embeddable - not even directly linkable but you can find it here if you click "video", then scroll over to LOST: Podcast: Michael Giacchino.

Film Music Reading List (from the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra Society)

The Hollywood Symphony Orchestra Society is dedicated to putting on live concerts of symphonic film music. It's a new thing - the inaugural concert in LA was just this past May.

For such a new group, they have an extensive web site, where I stumbled on a reading list for film music. I can vouch for this list only by saying I own a few books already, and I subscribed to a film music journal they listed...

Hollywood Symphony Orchestra Society Film Music Links

Photos of Scoring Session for "The Shooter"

Soundtrack.net has a photo set of the team hard at work recording the orchestral score - in Hollywood, by the way - for the new Mark Wahlberg film "The Shooter" (composer Mark Mancina, director Antoine Fuqua).

Get a glimpse of the photos from the session, they're good...



(The trailer by the way looks great...however this being a Viacom / Paramount production, it means I can't embed from YouTube, you have to click over to Yahoo Movies to see it...)

Michael Giacchino did Epic Video Game Scores Before Doing LOST

I was surprised today to learn that one of my favorite composers created one of my favorite scores (funny how that happens. ;-) ).

The score is Medal of Honor: Frontline, a PS2 World War II game. The composer is Michael Giacchino, composer for LOST.

What surprised me playing Frontline was the game's emotional depth. It's serious and very sad at points, akin to Saving Private Ryan (not a coincidence, as Spielberg's Dreamworks Interactive teamed with EA on the Medal of Honor series).

As a WWII game, the orchestration in Frontline leans LARGE: action cues feature chorales, big brass fanfares, piccolo flourishes, cymbal crashes, etc.

LOST's action is more about terror and fleeing, and everything is blankin' strange, so the music is quirkier. Non-Western drums suggest the jungle, and the orchestra slides and tremolos its way to creep things out.

But if you ask me, LOST's ratings are down because we've heard less of the longing, sweet Oceanic 815 main theme. It represents the emotional center of the show, and I think the audience may miss it. To be fair, there's not much sweetness to be had when the main characters are locked up in zoo cages. But the producers say we're "back to the beach" now, so I'm hope to hear it more this season.

Not surprisingly, the best and most listenable part of the Frontline score are two cues echoing the sweet side of LOST's music.

The main theme "Market Garden" (iTunes) is below, the other is "Arnhem" (iTunes). They're both worth the 99 cents.

For a free listen, someone created a WWII photo essay around "Market Garden" on YouTube. I should warn the images get a little heavy, but it's a nice way to experience the music.

Michael Giacchino - Market Garden - Medal of Honor: Frontline

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck: Shoot Him Now! Shoot Him Now!

My girlfriend recently showed me some Russian cartoons she grew up with, and I soon wanted to share with her my favorite childhood cartoon: "Rabbit Seasoning", where Bugs Bunny repeatedly tricks Daffy Duck into being shot by Elmer Fudd.

While she marveled at the gun violence, I couldn't help noticing the score makes productive study for film composers. The Looney Tunes cartoon musical style is very familiar: every action on the screen is extravagantly cued, down to the last footstep and blink. Popular songs are quoted for Paul-Schaffer-style musical puns (such as H.R. Bishop's "Home Sweet Home" accompanying Elmer and Daffy's arm-in-arm stroll to a mountain cabin - where Daffy is promptly shot).

Composer Carl Stalling's style may seem overly literal and hyperactive today, but it's extremely clever and the orchestration is rich. And the music moves so quickly, it's like studying a score on fast forward. 6 minutes and you've covered a hundred bases - fanfare, confusion, intimidation, flirting, rage, the list goes on...

Of course the music is only there to serve the dialogue:

DAFFY
Shoot him now! Shoot him now!

BUGS
You keep out of this. He doesn't have to shoot you now.

DAFFY
He does SO have to shoot me now! I DEMAND that you shoot me now!

My favorite musical bit is the little flute trill when Daffy pulses his eyeballs as he's up in Elmer Fudd's face...

AOL has the legal version of it freely available online, albeit with a preroll ad. But it's worth it:

Rabbit Seasoning

johnaugust.com ? How to write dialogue

From John August - on how to write dialogue:

We tend to think of dialogue as a tennis volley, with the subject being hit back and forth between speakers. But when you really listen, you realize that people talk over each other constantly, and rarely finish a complete thought.

To get a sense of this flow, you need to stop paying attention to the actual words being spoken. It’s the auditory equivalent of un-focusing your eyes. Listen for which speaker is dominating the conversation, and how often the other party chimes in to acknowledge he’s still paying attention.
...
How often should you eavesdrop? Pretty much constantly, with particular focus on finding interesting speakers. Some people are inherently funny, and if you soak up enough of their rhythms you can recreate them on the page fairly faithfully. But even the annoying woman ahead of you at the checkout line deserves a listen. You never know when she might come in handy.

Worth reading the whole thing...

Brian Eno to produce Coldplay

Via Sonic State:

When asked about the current state of the Music Industry, Eno said it was ‘terrific and frightening’ and talked about how easy it has become to make and distribute music. The downside of that being that there is less attention afforded to any individual piece.

He said he thought that music was in a ‘digestive and retrospective’ period with alot of guitar bands sounding like Talking Heads. He was surprised that David Byrne’s influence on music has stayed dormant for so long.

Well it's good news for Coldplay they're going in a bit of a new direction by working with Eno - their sound to date is a bit too soft and mushy to my taste. I've read that the band is big on crafting and polishing their music, so it sounds like they are ambitious as musicians - someday one of those guys is going to be scoring films, I have a feeling.

In the Eno podcast there's the usual discussion of ambient music (it's like a painting, a still space the listener can listen in), lots of Britishy, intellectual, interesting thoughts on music (like (a) recording is a radical departure in how you experience music, since before records, the live performance of a musical piece was different every time you heard it, and (b) the fragmentation of music form online distribution makes it very difficult to use music to express your position in the culture).

Who's got time to listen to all this stuff, anyway? If you do, check out the BBC interview mp3 online.

JT Schnaars at Genre Matters explains: What makes recuts work?

Genre Matters has some thoughtful, er, thoughts on why recuts work:

At their most basic level, these trailer remixes are all about genre; about leveraging the semantic elements of one genre into the syntactic elements of another. In most cases the humor comes from the interaction between the viewer's knowledge of the original source film, or at least knowledge of that film's generic underpinnings, and the reversal of expectations that comes with the re-edits. Usually, music (a semantic element in and of itself) plays the key role in shifting the focus.

The full post is here.

Will the Web make film festivals obsolete? - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

Will the Web make film festivals obsolete? - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

When Harry Met Sally, recut

In a fit of silliness last summer in Prague I stayed up all night making a recut of When Harry Met Sally to look like a horror film, using music from Batman Begins.

Some links to it came out today, 7 months after I posted it. The music is from the Batman Begins score, which I just adore, a collaboration of composers Hanz Zimmer and James Newton Howard.

Anyway, the links (any of these will get you to the recut, people seem to like it):
SnarkyGossip (the original poster, thanks Wendy!)
Boing Boing
Hainsworth
VH1 Best Week Ever
Xene's World
David Chandler
popcultist
johnny r

(btw, iFilm made an unauthorized copy of this recut and put it on their own servers. Isn't that ironic, since Viacom, which owns iFilm, is today ordering YouTube to take down unauthorized videos? On the other hand, VH1 - also part of Viacom - was nice enough to embed the original YouTube video...)

UPDATE: ah, the power of Boing Boing...more linkers:
Pretty is as Pretty Does
Angry Chix
The Political Pit Bull
Kisreal
PistolWimp
DirtyCarl
Kajagugu Poker
in my diatribe
milner videos
l33t geek
UmmYeah
vson
sounding furious
StarDirt
Dmitry Kedrin
cupojoe
More here...

Also someone copied & uploaded it to CollegeHumor.com...

ANOTHER UPDATE: Links from Steve Rubel, Steve Bryant, Metafilter, HotAir, Zigzigger...
MORE: Fantent's doorfame, Ray Richmond (Hollywood Reporter)...

Jerry Seinfeld Hates Movie Trailer Music

From the WSJ, a story on Jerry Seinfeld trying to do something original for his new movie's teaser trailers:

Mr. Seinfeld, who is writing and producing "Bee Movie," and voicing the lead character, Barry Bee Benson, says he wanted the previews to cut through the clutter in a crowded Hollywood marketplace. "Who's not tired of the usual trailers with all the excitement, loud music and quick cuts," Mr. Seinfeld says. "They're exhausting and annoying."

He's right. Though his point is about more than just the music, I've observed the musical language of trailers as narrow and stale of late.

One of the most common and well-worn motifs is the dark ambient beginning, followed by a few percussion shocks when the main plot is revealed, then an accelerating, crescendoing climax. It's been great fun for years, but there must be other things marketers and composers can try, yes?

Bee Movie's trailer definitely branches out, mainly by removing the music. Silence backs up a very awkward scene, not entirely unlike the comic style of "The Office".

Then it's off to the races with a very funny slapstick scene backed by a very traditional, big slapstick orchestral cue.

btw, IMDb lists Rupert Gregson-Williams as doing the score, he also scored "Over the Hedge"...