Harry Potter Composer Nicholas Hooper

Of the John Williams Harry Potter scores, he seems to like Prisoner of Azkhaban best:

I started by listening to a lot of the John Williams score, particularly from the third movie, “Prisoner of Azkaban,” which I loved and I suppose is closest to what I was trying to do. I used some of his themes, particularly his Hedwig theme. After that, we all decided that it was best if I moved into my own way of composing rather than trying to emulate John Williams, which is impossible. I did a different kind of score for “Half-Blood Prince,” really. It was simpler, the way I write music is simpler.

Well it's not a Harry Potter score if you don't have Hedwig's Theme. Which, by the way, is finding itself onto more and more concert performances:

Temp Music vs. Finished Music

I came across a short doc 34x25x26 in the YouTube screening room about female mannequins and how this company creates a beauty idea. It's got over a million hits (it's creepy watching men in a factory create female mannequin bodies). The filmmaker Jessie Epstein also posted a version using the temp music by Loscil (which is very experimental electronic-ambient music).

There is a lot of similarity in tone, and they both work, but I think one of them works a lot better than the other:

The temp version:



The final version:

Film Composers: Tarantino doesn't like your music, and neither did Kubrick!

Kubrick:

Exclude a pop music score from what I am about to say. However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time?

Tarantino:

Music is so important. The idea of paying a guy and showing him your movie at the end. Who the f*** is this guy [who's] going to s**t on my movie?

The problem is, film music is nearly always done in a rush, from the top of the industry to the bottom. It's hard to deliver 60-90 minutes of great music in 6 weeks. Even Debussy had unfinished operas that he worked on for years. Bands typically spend a year recording and mixing a 50-minute album.

Start earlier, maybe pay extra for extra time, be willing to be different, and you can get better music.

Even with all that, it's still hard to beat a moment like this:

Great Moments in Composer Firings, Vol. I: 2001 A Space Odyssey

When you pick music for your scene, taking a moment to ask "what is the point of view?" can make the difference.

Stanley Kubrick commissioned Alex North to create a score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Midway through Kubrick cut North loose and decided to use temp tracks selected from classical music.

And Richard Strauss' Thus Sprach Zarathusra fanfare became really, really famous.

Comparing the two versions of the scene shows how point of view of the music can make (or destroy) a scene.

Strauss' fanfare was called "Sunrise" and was just the opening of a suite inspired by Nietzsche's writings. The music is shooting for the eternal and and omnipotent, and those pounding tympanis lend the scene more than a dash of violence (music starts about 0:20):



North's music, wonderful as it is, now sounds dated and a little bit naive. It's bouncy and enthusiastic, and occasional strings and woodwind colors lend a shrieking human quality. The human element diminishes the scene - something far bigger than us is at work here:



One could ague that Strauss' music is simply better (Kubrick himself said so). The fundamental problem is the point of view. North's music looks up at the scene as if audience is feeling awestruck.

Strauss' fanfare, not written for the film, looks down on the moment, as if omnipotent forces, as inevitable as the sunrise, are in control.

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...)

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"...

Metallica Hearts Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone is a film composer who has has scored over 400 films, some of the more famouser ones are "The Mission" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly".

"The Mission" is the first film score I ever listened to. I was introduced to it by a researcher at MIT. He worked on computer generated music in a dungeon beneath the MIT Media Lab, outfitted with Unix workstations and a pair of Bosendorfer grand pianos.

One day he played the score from "The Mission", asking what I thought of it, and wondering how he might replicate a full orchestral sound on the computer (technology has come a long way since then, nowadays they can fake an orchestra about as well as they can fake sugar).

Anyway, hearing Morricone's music that day turned me on to film scoring for the first time.

Now there's a new tribute album called "We All Love Ennio Morricone", which the NY Times article covers. Metallica is contributing a cover of "The Ecstasy of Gold" from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". Metallica has used the original version of the track to open their concerts for over 20 years. Which leads us to this priceless quote:

“To me his music is just absolutely inspirational, corny as that may sound,” said James Hetfield, Metallica’s singer and guitarist. “He has taken so many risks, and his music is not polished whatsoever. It’s very rude and blatant. All of a sudden a Mexican horn will come blasting through and just take over the melody. It’s just so raw, really raw, and it feels real, unpolished. You hear mistakes in it, and that’s just great — if they are mistakes. Who knows? There’s so much character in it, and I appreciate that in such a polished world of soundtracks.”

That is some seriously high praise. And a reminder that it's not always good to be overly polished.

Alexandre Desplat wins Best Score at Golden Globes

Winners are listed here.

Alexandre Desplat won for "The Painted Veil", the score features Lang Lang playing piano.

And Prince won best song for "The Song of the Heart" in "Happy Feet". Very old school, it's Prince being Prince while playing it very safe...check out this dancing penguin music video using footage from the movie.

Composers Commonly Collaborate on Compostitions

Jeff Bond has a nice feature article in the Hollywood Reporter on the increasing number of collaborations in film scores in recent years. It seems that technology is making it easier for composers to pass tracks back and forth on their Macs. Says Andrew Gross, who collaborated with John King (of Dust Brothers fame) for "Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny":

When we work together, we both use Apple's Logic Pro. Even though he's in New York and I'm in L.A., it's very simple. We can transfer our files to each other over the Internet and then double click on the session, and we're off and running. I can immediately open his files and start tweaking.

Guess I better switch from Digital Performer to Logic Audio and soon.
However not everyone loves collaborating. Says James Newton Howard, on doing "Batman Begins" with Hans Zimmer:

In most multiple composer situations, you find it because someone got nervous about the music and insisted that somebody else come in and help. 'Batman' could have been a disaster, but the kind of schizophrenic nature of Bruce Wayne and the Batman character lent itself to a wide interpretation musically. And even though we did collaborate on almost every cue, there are areas I worked on more than Hans and areas Hans worked on more than I did. I think we'll repeat it hopefully many times in the future, but overall, I don't know anyone who wouldn't feel hemmed in and restricted by having to compromise with another composer

Well, I love the "Batman Begins" soundtrack, and I don't think it sounds schizophrenic at all.

Anyway, the good news is if every film has 2 composers, there will be twice as much work out there! ;-) Read the whole thing.