About Our Campaign
The Mumbler is a short film where mumblers are quarantined to an industrial treatment center. The film follows the story of Willow, a young woman with a decimated speech enhancing device struggling to get a replacement. The Mumbler was shot in January of 2019 and completed in summer 2019.
Except for the recording of the live music score, The Mumbler is now ready for festival submission. Recording a live music score with real musicians will not only complete the film but will dramatically increase its value. Here’s how:
The Mumbler’s music takes the perspective of the main character, Willow, a smart young woman who feels suppressed by others because of her inability to communicate. Her experience is not far away from 18th-century kings and queens who were often harassed and muted by court intrigue. By using classical period music as a source, the score encapsulates the frustration that Willow feels while at the same time keeping the film light and comedic in feel.
What We Need & What You Get
Our fundraising goal is $2,000. To properly perform and record the score, $2,000 will get us:
French Horn (instrumentalists): $100
Two Bassoons (instrumentalists): $200
Score Supervisor: $300
Recording Engineer: $400
Recording Studio Time: $500
Microphone Rentals: $200
Equipment Rentals: $200
Catering: $100
If you are kind enough to donate to our film, there are a plethora of rewards to be given out, from free downloads of the score, special edition posters and T-Shirts, to a vinyl record and even an executive producer credit. Additionally, some tiers of support will receive access to a live stream of when we record the score!
More than anything else, you'll have the distinct pleasure of helping us do great work on a film that means so much to us.
The Impact
By far, most independent movies have scores that are computer generated and synthetic. There's a trade-off when movies are made with fake instruments: There is a remarkable dip in the emotional impact of the story.
When real musicians play the film score, it's much more personal. The musicians can extend their humanity to the film. Computers might be savvy time savers, but they'll never be able to beat human beings when it comes time to bring emotions to the table and really help the characters and the story shine.
Your contribution will help us bring a beautiful humanity to the film. So few producers and filmmakers really care about the music to the extent that we do. It is our very strong opinion that a film is not done until the music feels appropriate for the story.
Your contribution will help The Mumbler be more memorable and enjoyable. Your contribution will will also enable a bunch of non-conformists make a movie that completely bucks the filmmaking trends that seem to scream "quicker is better." No! We want to do this right, and we will make it happen!
Risks & Challenges
We believe that the risks are lower for The Mumbler than for most other projects. We have a fantastic score supervisor and producer Shelly Eager, who is executive director of Cinematic Symphony, handpicking the best possible talent for the recording. With Shelly's help, we have figured out that the actual recording of the score will take us 3 hours or less, with one break. Additionally, Shelly triple-checked our score to make sure we didn't make any mistakes in writing for french horn and bassoon (we didn't!).
Our audio engineer Eddy Hobizal has also agreed to record the film score in his home studio, Treehouse Recording Studio, in North Austin. Eddy has access to world-class microphones, equipment, and a wonderful sounding studio. More importantly, Eddy has a deep knowledge of recording orchestral and pop music. We are absolutely going to get a great sounding score with him on board.
The musicians will be conducted by Dave Wirth, our composer on the project. Dave has a masters degree from the #1 music school in the USA, The Eastman School of Music. Dave also knows how to get the best takes from the musicians, how to conduct the pieces, and how to get the best possible emotional response from the musicians.
Madison Bounds is our recording session supervising producer. Through extensive collaboration with Dave, both the composer and the director will work together to make the score shine.
Like any creative endeavor, especially one as collaborate as film and music, creating a safe, healthy, and productive creative environment is always a challenge. Yet by working with longtime collaborators in a comfortable environment, we have minimized any potential bumps in our way. We both feel 100% confident in who we will work with, and have full trust in their abilities as artists and as people.
Other Ways You Can Help
If you are not in the financial situation to donate, do not worry! There is plenty of other ways you can help.
Here are some super-amazing and concrete ways you can help us:
Email a friend about us, and ask them to send us an email. We love to meet new people!
Post on your Facebook page about how rare it is to see short films take the music so seriously. Then link to our campaign
Write a blog post about how we want to use real instruments on this project.
Tweet about how The Mumbler is bucking the film score trends.
Write a fake-news article about how The Mumbler is outsourcing all of our music to the computer slaves we're holding in a secret, undisclosed location.
Write a short post about how we are employing and supporting musicians in Texas
If you are the more esoteric type, send us good vibes, visualize for us that we got our funding, and imagine the joy and the gratitude we will all feel once this score gets done. Though this request is a little out there, it would mean the world to us!
Reading Notes
22 Minute Read | Tablet or Laptop Recommended
Topics and Themes
Creative process in storytelling, Themes and motifs, Film score unity, Junior high school embarassment, Three types of musical motifs, Getting a unified score from your composer
My Most Embarrassing Story From Junior High School
I grew up in a time before smart phones, two day shipping, or free instructional videos a click away. Finding answers back then wasn’t as simple as getting your phone out; You actually had to walk up to a book stack and find a book made of paper. All knowledge came with weight. If you found a good book that suited your needs, you buried your nose in it. If not, tough cookies.
When I was in junior-high, just like practically all other junior-highers, all I wanted was to be cool and popular. Since there were no helpful after-school specials that offered specific steps on becoming popular, the only chance I had was to find a book on it. Surely, there was a book out there that had the answers that I desperately needed to survive and thrive in junior high school, right?
I had three options to find this book. I could...
Go to a bookstore. To make this happen I would have to convince someone to drive me there, find a book that could help me be more popular, and buy it without any judgement from the cashier. It’s almost like I could read their minds: “Why do you want that book? Are you really that desperate?” Nope! Couldn’t deal with that.
Go to the library. Considering how I desperately wanted to be cool, I never stepped one foot in any library because no one in their right mind would be caught dead walking around a library. Yeah, I was seriously enlightened as a 6th grader.
Order a book through a special catalog delivered every month to our homeroom teachers. I chose this option. It seemed private enough.
When the book catalog was passed out in the classroom, a brightly colored and thin sheaf that wouldn’t last a minute in the lightest rain, I thumbed through its 6 pages. I immediately found a book entitled How To Be Cool And Funny.
I thought to myself, “Yes! This is it! This is the answer to all my problems! I’m gonna be so popular after I get this book! All the girls are gonna want to go out with me! I’m gonna be king! I will rule junior high, forever!” I cobbled up my allowance and ordered a copy of this most important book.
Four weeks later, a big package of books was delivered to my homeroom class. I was really excited! I will finally learn the secrets to being popular, cool, and possibly even funny!
My 6th grade homeroom teacher, Mr. Coleman, was a teacher close to retirement by the time I had him. So, when Mr. Coleman called up each student to pick up their book order, he also decided to announce their book choice to the entire class.
Uh-oh.
What made it worse was that the shipping invoice was in alphabetical order... My last name starts with the letter W.
The three minutes I had to wait for Mr. Coleman to get to my name was unbearable. I wanted to jump out the window and escape on foot, hop a train, hit South America, live without Cheerios or Micro Machines or Gi Joe, get adopted by a pack of wild dogs, walk on all fours and eat like a wild animal, forget writing cursive, lose the smell of freshly Xeroxed copypaper, and let go of speaking a human language.
After what seemed like an eternity, Mr. Coleman finally announced: “Dave Wirth: Please come to the front of the class and pick up your copy of How To Be Cool And Funny.” Goddammit.
With everyone in the class staring at me, I dragged my heels to the front of the classroom. I picked up my book, forced my barely working feet to carry me back to my desk, and promptly buried my head in my arms. Even the motivational posters in the room were laughing at me.
Later that night, I burned the book in my backyard.
Part I: The Creative Process in Storytelling, Start To Finish.
Have you ever marveled at how stories get written at all? I mean, it’s an incredible thing, right? Stories start from nothing and end up becoming something.
When you look close at the creative process across different mediums of expression, there are some notable similarities. From charcoal sketches to graffiti, from simple guitar chords to massive orchestrations, from a spark of an idea into a beautifully fleshed out script, all creative ideas start from the same place: Nothing.
Sooner or later, we creators get the sense that there’s something just over the horizon of consciousness. An idea is waiting there for us to discover. It’s on the tip of our tongues. We wait for it, we search for it, and then we find it! It’s the idea that makes us think, “Ooooo, what is at the end of that?” It sweetly kisses the air around us, singing to us from far off in the distance like a siren song. If we follow that song to it’s origin, we do it with gusto, anticipation, and enjoyment.
Professional creators know that the ego takes a back seat in a true act of creation. If they’re diligent and committed enough, the ideas they find end up building on each other. At the end of this process, they can look at what they created and be surprised to see that it’s a living piece of art.
Had I not been paying attention, I wouldn’t have remembered the story I shared in the beginning of this article at all. It came back to me about two months ago in a hushed panic. Although I intensely felt the hot shame of this memory 20 years or so later, I still loved remembering the details. Frankly, when I remembered it and got over the fact that it actually happened, I laughed as hard as the motivational posters did. And writing it came easily. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t care. I followed my curiosity and just went for it.
The best part of writing the story down was when I had the realization that the story no longer belonged to me. The story began to live a life of its own, independent of me. It had a form; It felt alive. I was reminded me of a quote from Paul Klee (paraphrased, and if I’ve got the author wrong than tell me in the comments):
You know you’re done if you look at what you created and it looks back at you.
If you’re a writer or director, have you ever truly appreciated the magnitude of the moment where you know the story is looking back at you? Where it feels magical? Where it is brimming and bursting with energy? Where it’s alive? Have you ever wondered how on earth you got there in the first place?
If you’re anything like me, you’d just as curious about how a creative idea becomes alive, how this process works, how it happens.
Without a doubt I’m going to dissect the process in this article, but I promise you that I’ll be careful. Creativity is a mysterious, fragile force. There is so much of a miracle when what we create becomes alive. It’s delicate. What I’m attempting to do in this post is like taking a grandfather clock apart and putting it back together. Risky, but necessary, because with clarity and more mastery over the creative process, we can all create better scripts, better film scores, and better stories.
On that note, I will have a full section where I’ll be getting into film scoring and some examples later in the post. I want to talk generally about the process we composers go through to make a badass film score for you so you know what to expect. After all, this article series is called Storytelling With Sound.
Each creative process starts somewhere, and that’s where I’ll begin today. It’s not a bad idea to understand the strange, weird, lovely place that contain the origins of all stories.
The Origins of Story
From what I gather, many people have a hangup when it comes to creating something new. It’s a simple difficulty: How to start creating? It can be a little terrifying, for sure.
Luckily, starting can feel the same for everyone. Not even the most famous, successful, and prolific artists are totally immune to the difficulties of starting the creative process. The process is entirely democratic and indifferent to money, success, fame, or any other modern trappings.
And yet, this starting space holds just as much magic and beauty for a beginner as it does a seasoned professional.
Each artist who sets out in this starting place and sticks with it eventually feels the subtle pang of excitement that tells them this one idea or that other idea is the right one. It can be scary, but the more a creator allows herself to pay the prices of entry into that nothingness, which I think is a land of ideas, the larger the spoil when she emerges.
This space, this beginning part of the creative process, is what I like to call The Liminal Space.
The Liminal Space
One of my favorite books by the author Salmon Rushdie is Haroun And The Sea Of Stories. Originally written for his son, the novel is set in a secret, magical world. The world is hidden from the “real” world, one of factories, billowing waves of smoke, and gridlocked transportation. The magical realm can be entered by accident or by invitation, and it is a little of both for two characters in the book.
In this magical realm, there is a main body of water that is called the sea of stories. Stories naturally bubble throughout the sea, free for anyone to pick up. However, and here’s the catch, characters can freely dip into the sea of stories for inspiration as long as they are in that magical world in the first place.
I love this setup! First, that there is a sea of stories. Second, the world where the sea of stories resides can only be entered by accident or invitation. It’s not a place that can be entered willy-nilly.
This magical world is similar to the liminal space, and it’s the very beginning of our journey into creating, no matter the medium.
There are thousands of authors who refer to the liminal space in their works. One of my favorites is from Michael Meade in his fantastic book Men And The Water Of Life, where he writes about an initiation by water, and how intense it can feel:
The Water of Life can only be found by breaking down, by wandering away, by being and feeling lost. The world of water dissolves and wears away established patterns and accomplishments. Initiations by water begin with an accumulation of losses and sorrows, an expansion of emptiness inside, the feeling that life has stopped flowing in a natural and healthy way.
Phillip Pullman often writes of the many possibilities he knows before he writes the first sentence in a story. To him, that first sentence is the most important because it can define a story and it’s direction. Before that sentence is written, there are unlimited possibilities, but afterwords there is clarity. He defines this starting point as Phase Space, from his book Daemon Voices, Page 134:
Phase Space is a term from dynamics. It’s the notational space which contains not just the actual consequences of the present moment, but all possible consequences.
The Liminal Space is like the phase space. It is a space of ideas and possibilities. It is really similar to Haroun and the Sea of Stories in that there is a sea of stories freely available to those in the world. If you’re a writer/director, I imagine that you entered the liminal space when you created your stories, when you plucked them out of thin air. The same happens for me when I start a new score.
If this space is so awesome, why can’t we enter it all the time to get the best ideas? Well, to be frank, it’s the entering of the space that is troublesome. The liminal space doesn’t always welcome us into it. To enter the world of ideas we need to pay for admission.
Paying The Entrance Fees to the Liminal Space
As it stands, the liminal space is not a place many people enter willingly, and for good reason. It's a place where change is born. And for change to occur, there has to be a force or a feeling, something to push us forward into the confusing area of not knowing anything. Frankly, most of us don’t want to feel uncomfortable in quite this way, and to be clear: We will sometimes feel incredibly uncomfortable in the liminal space!
It’s not uncommon to feel a bit of depression, confusion, the upside-down-ness of this strange creative space. It’s like the carpet is being yanked out from beneith us. Yet, we need to be willing to accept being stuck, unsure, confused, annoyed, angry, and/or depressed in order to get that one idea that really makes sense. We make a sacrifice of our comfort to come out on top later. We must be okay with feeling a bit of indecision, fear, perhaps even outward aggravation that something is there but we just can’t find it… yet.
Why? Why on earth do we have to feel this way? Isn’t there someway around this sacrifice? Isn’t there another way? No, not really. To understand why, we have to talk about ego, just a little bit.
So, what does ego have to do with the creative process? Well, everything…
Role Of Ego In The Creative Process
I am willing to bet that the most experienced and successful creators in the world probably have a good relationship with their own ego. They must keep it in check during the creative process, or else it might streak throughout the creative playing field and piss on first base while it’s at it.
This three lettered word, the EGO, is somehow worried with creating something “good.” Judgements are the ego’s wheelhouse; Ego is very comfortable with labeling good and bad. And when a professional creator is in the act of creating, nothing can stop an idea dead in it’s tracks faster than the ego saying, “Whoa dude, that’s total shit.”
To enter the creative liminal space where the best ideas come to us, we must check the ego at the door and say, “Sorry pal, this is a private club.” As Julia Cameron advises us, we have to learn to let quality go and just focus on quantity. We have to relinquish all control and jump head first into the deep weirdness of not knowing anything. That is the price of admission: Not knowing if what you’ll create is gonna be considered “good” or “bad,” but engaging nonetheless.
Uhg. Is it worth it?
Without a doubt, yes.
Without entering the liminal space, the work I do as a composer falls flat. I have enough experience to recognize when I’m creating something that doesn’t have a spark to it, doesn’t interest me. It’s like I’m trudging through wet concrete. Yuck.
In my work, I constantly approach being as comfortable as I can be inside the liminal space. I enter it as willingly and effortlessly as I can. I pay the entrance fees with joy and gratitude. I check my ego at the door, and I wait for ideas to come to me. The trick is to be comfortable with creating anything at all from that space, to just try. If nothing comes, no biggie. Try again tomorrow.
But sooner or later, something starts to happen. Some strange momentum is starting to build, ever so subtly. And then, some small idea comes and whispers in my ear, “Hey, I’m an excellent friend. Let’s hang out!”
What a moment this is! I love it when the right idea comes to me. And it should come as no surprise that this is the next part of the process.
The Rumblings of a Distant Thunderstorm
When we enter the liminal space pay our entrance fee in full, its inevitable that we will start to feel it when ideas are in the air. As Neil Gaiman put it in his wonderful book Art Matters:
Stories are waiting like distant thunderstorms, grumbling and flickering on the grey horizon.
When we begin to feel a distant thunderstorm of ideas coming to us, they are a signpost. Something is a coming!
This distant rumbling of ideas is also like the siren song in the Odyssey, but the only death we get is the death of the ego. We creators are helplessly pulled closer to the siren song of a creative idea, and it is one of the biggest rushes we feel. And yet, we can’t feel that rush without surrendering our ego a little bit. We must let go! Unlike Odysseus, we are not tethered to a mast of a ship, and we won’t be lured to our doom if we follow that sweet song. Maybe our ego will temporarily feel death, but we come out unharmed and with a beautiful story.
And here’s the great news: This thunderstorm, this siren song that we follow, has the potential to clear away the effects of the liminal space. Like, if an idea pleases us, we’ll follow it and end up with an entirely new story, brimming with energy. And just like that, we have left the liminal space.
Oh, what a great feeling this is! We go from a deep confusion to having a clue about where we are going to go next! Ask any creative about this feeling, and they will tell you it’s intoxicating.
Before I move on, I have to write it again: We won’t be open to new ideas if we haven’t fully entered the liminal space in the first place. In my strong opinion, the liminal space offers an embarrassment of riches to creators who fully enter and submit to paying the entrance fees (aka confusion, frustration, or maybe just a blessedly benign indecision). When the ideas come, that’s when the momentum really builds.
Ideas Need Presentation
The distant thunderstorm, the sweet siren song, is just the beginning. It’s just the rumbling of an idea. It’s only in our heads. Sooner or later, doesn’t that idea need a physical representation in order to communicate to an audience?
If I never felt the pull to write down my mortifying junior high school story, it would still be knocking about down in the murky depths of my subconscious, like a ghost farting in the basement. Sooner or later, we have to begin to structure our ideas. In film composing if we don’t actually start structuring our music into something concrete and unified, let alone record them, we don’t have a chance in hell to serve the story or the audience because no one will hear it.
The physical representation of the creative matter, these solid building blocks of story, or creation, is tangible. It is the medium of which we present an idea to the audience. In film scoring, they are the building blocks of musical story. And these building blocks unify a story into a whole being, something that can be alive if it’s structured well enough.
The way that I see it, these unifying elements are called Elementary Particles. From Phillip Pullman, in his book Daemon Voices, I am truly indebted to him for coining the term.
So, what exactly are elementary particles, and how do they help film scores and stories live?
Elementary Particles: Building Materials of Story
Elementary particles are the basic building blocks of story, the vehicles for delivery that unite a story into a well-conceived whole. You could think of elementary particles as themes or motifs that are used to inform an audience of the real action and development of the story.
Let’s start with an example: Think of how many ways people fell and dropped in the movie Inception. Innocuous, right? I mean, how many times was this one simple action used, and in how many ways?
If you rewatch the movie, you’ll see a lot of this specific elementary particle being displayed in different ways, from being tipped over backwards into a bathtub full of water, to instructing others on how they will “wake up,” all the way to a spinning top not falling over. In my opinion, something as small as this action can help to frame a narrative, and many narratives weave multiple motifs and themes into a single story. It’s no different from film scoring, as I’ll show you later in this article. For now, keep an open mind that these actions can be important vehicles to a story. After all, without that elementary particle of falling, how else do these characters "wake up” in Inception?
I’m not a film theorist by any stretch, but it’s hard to deny how unified Inception feels due to many interlocking motifs that we see throughout the movie. So, could we refer to elementary particles as motifs?
Sure!
Elementary Particles as Motifs
There are unlimited ways to physically unite a story as a living form, but for simplicity’s sake, you could think of elementary particles as recurring motifs.
Elementary Particles can be as subtle as a distinct color palate (i.e. yellow in Enemy by Denis Villeneuve), as bombastic as a shark fin slowly disappearing beneath the surface of the water, like waking up from an induced dream by falling backwards, or something as innocuous as walking. Motifs are used in a way that informs the story, and most importantly gives a sense of continuity.
Let’s bring this back to my humiliating junior high school story. Look closely… Did you notice an elementary particle in my story? I purposely included one: Walking.
I used this motif to unify my story into a comprehensive whole. Further, I used it to show you how I was feeling without being explicit about it:
"You actually had to walk up to a book stack” - Expressing inconvenience.
"No one in their right mind would be caught dead walking around a library” - Shame, fear of embarrassment
“Be raised by a pack of wild dogs, walk on all fours and eat like a wild animal” - Imagination of Dave Wirth circa 6th grade
"I dragged my heels to the front of the classroom.” - Reluctance to feel embarrassment
"I picked up my book, forced my barely working feet to carry me back to my desk” - Overwhelm and overstimulation
This elementary particle helped me present and unify my story. If I did my job right, it does so in a subtle way. It’s my hope you didn’t notice it until I pointed it out. And, there are some other elementary particles hidden in my story, too.
Whatever you want to call them, however you want to use them, elementary particles or motifs or themes or whatever, they can structure and unify a story. They are flexible, they are ready to be employed to show things that aren’t explicitly mentioned in dialogue (just like a specific camera angle can show what a character’s motivations are). When used correctly, they can give a story a skeletal structure. And, when stories have that structure, they have a much higher chance of living on their own.
And now we approach the final aspect of creating: The moment when we realize we are done.
Towards Living Art
In review: Stories start when creators agree to pay the price to enter the liminal space. They allow themselves to feel disheveled, confused, and possibly depressed. Sooner or later, the electricity of an idea is felt over the horizon of the consciousness. They work with that idea, fashion it into something physical using elementary particles that they gravitate to (walking, in my story for instance).
From there, what happens?
The final stage of the process is a quick one. It’s literally just a realization. It happens when you're looking closely at a piece of art that you worked on, perhaps for years, and you recognize that it’s looking straight back at you. I imagine that this is how Christopher Nolan looks back on Inception or Steven Spielberg looks back on Schindler’s List. These stories live on their own, independent of their creators.
If you’ll remember my paraphrased quote from Paul Klee:
You know you’re done if you look at what you created and it looks back at you.
There it is. The creative piece of art. It is living, all on it’s own! We want to experience the moment of creating a living something. It feels so good to create something that really connects with an audience, serves them, gives them something they desperately need in their lives. The best stories in the world have this living quality!
So far we’ve been focused on the creative process with regards to storytelling with words. I showed you how I used the elementary particle of walking to inform my truly humiliating junior high school story.
Now it’s time to shift our focus onto sound and music. Does the film scoring process look any different? Does creating music have any similarities or differences creatively than other mediums?
Definitely. Knowing how the creative process works for a composer and what kinds of elementary particles he/she can use can only help you with your stories. Paying close attention to that will help you with grow your career, if that’s a concern to you.
So, let’s jump into understanding what to expect from your composer in their creative process and how they can create a unified narrative in sound like you did with word. In this section, I will talk extensively about options you have for musical elementary particles. Knowing that will give you an edge.
Part II: The Building Blocks of Musical Story in Film Scoring
As composers, our first moment sitting down and looking at a film is the liminal space for us. We may know exactly what you’re asking for, but we have to enter the space of not-knowing. We must experience the absolutely crazy feeling that we don’t have any clue what we are doing. Any composer who says they never get even a tiny bit doubtful when first starting a score is lying through their teeth!
Hans Zimmer hilariously described how he avoids the liminal space: He often asks his team of engineers and musicians to do crazy things that he “needs” before he starts messing around with the theme of the movie. When he does actually sit down to compose, he may even sit on his hands and not allow his piano skills to dictate what themes come to him. This is his liminal space. He wants to sit with the movie and find the world that the story lives in, and he’s trying to find the one musical elementary particle that he can depend upon throughout the movie he’s scoring.
It’s our jobs as film composers to show up, try things out, and to allow ourselves to feel the confusion and indecision. If we can muster the strength enough to tolerate that period of weirdness, we will end up getting something. The distant rumblings of ideas sooner or later come to us, and we gain confidence. Once we have your approval, we can build you a score that really fits your movie like a glove.
Speaking of building you a score, we composers have tons of ways to approach your project. Tons! Our job is to find what type of motifs, or elementary particles, are appropriate for your film and then deliver that score in a timely manner.
To get started, it’ll be helpful for you to know just a tiny bit about what kinds of building blocks, what kinds of elementary particles, are available to composers. I’ve included three elementary particles that I love working with.
To start, lets go with the most common elementary particle in film scores: Melody.
Musical Elementary Particle #1: Melodic Themes
When it comes to uniting a movie’s film score into an interweaving web of motifs, melody is definitely the most classic.
Melodies are basically a series of single notes. It’s really that simple. Then, if a particular series of notes are repeated, this melody could be known as a theme.
A very famous musical theme would be from the first movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony. Hector Berlioz penned another memorable theme in his Symphonie Fantastique. When we hear these themes, we quickly think of these pieces of music, not unlike when someone sings the Star Wars theme.
Melodic themes are incredibly flexible, just like the elementary particle of walking that I presented in my story. Composers can take a single melodic theme and use it in different circumstances, to describe different moods and motivations.
The most famous example of a film composer using melodic themes in film music is John Williams. He often creates themes for just about everything in a movie, including themes for the movie itself, specific characters, and even repeated actions. This isn’t a new idea (though the way John Williams does it is incredible). These are traditionally called Leitmotifs, and they could be thought of as smaller melodies that get repeated in specific points of a narrative. John Williams weaves a brilliant tapestry of melodies into his scores and creates a living, breathing piece of art that way.
Other film composers tend to be a bit more spare with the amount of melody present, but their scores are no less effective. The score for First Man by Justin Hurwitz is an example of a melodically themed score that is more spare and minimalistic than a typical John Williams score. He presents the melodic themes in different ways according to the action on the screen; A different orchestration here, a different mood there, a different action somewhere else. It's a brilliant soundtrack.
The best part of melodic themes is that there is just so much a composer can do with them. A single theme can provide enough material for an entire movie, including the underscoring, if you wanted it to. When a composer uses multiple themes, he exponentially increases the amount of variety of melody in a movie.
Melodic elementary particles have exactly the same function as do the elementary particles do with the written word: To give structure and to unite the story. Just like walking in my ridiculous story of humiliation, melodic themes can help to inform the audience of what's really going on, but in a subtle way.
Let's jump into some examples. In each of these, I composed one main melodic theme which could represent what a viewer hears at the start of the movie. From there, I recycled parts of this main cue to make it appropriate for other related cues that needed different vibes. My aim was to create an interlocking web of melody that felt unified throughout five examples, like a miniature film score.
Let’s jump in! Here’s our main title sequence:
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
The first example established the framework for the “movie.” From this point forward, I am officially allowing myself to recycle parts of this example and reuse them in different ways.
So, to create that unified structure, I first took the melody from the piano in the main title and re-orchestrated it with the horn and oboe. Then I took some sound clusters from the melodies and the bass line and created the piano part. Here is the result:
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Okay, now what can I recycle? Well, why can’t I use just the chords that the celli and the two french horns were playing, and use them for underscoring?
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Now that you know that we have some flexibility with our material, what would happen if we wanted to create a cue that sounded disconcerting? Absolutely possible, but to get there we need to get even more subtle.
First, take a look at the timpani in the main theme. If you were paying close attention to it, you’ll see that it is playing a very distinct rhythm in measures 3-4. In this next example, why don’t we reuse that rhythm? Second, if you were paying really close attention to the viola in the main theme, you’d notice it was playing only one note. Why not take that rhythm and one note and combine them? It could be a bit tense!
This cue could describe a point in time where characters are unsure, but still engaged with looking for answers. The important point is that it’s still united in feel and presentation:
And finally, why can’t we make an incredibly gentle cue? The opposing melodies in the strings and the piano in the main theme sequence can be played in a totally different rhythm, and slower overall tempo. This would be ideal for the moment when we are going for something that is more intimate, a moment between two people, exchanging knowing looks with each other:
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Flexibility in Melodically Themed Scores
Melodically themed film scores are classic, diverse, and incredibly flexible. They are a respectful nod to the golden age of cinema and can be appropriate for many styles of movies. They can be used to describe multiple moments in a film and unite it, either by using a single theme throughout or by using leitmotifs for every single action or character. Melodic themes can be used on a small-scale movie that’s set in one room, or they can be used on a film that’s set in multiple places in an unknown universe.
Melody is flexible.
But what if you want more subtlety, something a little less in-your-face, musically speaking? What if you dislike the idea of having a epically melodic score, like John Williams would write? What if you want something simpler? Easier? More relaxed? Slower moving? Subtle?
Musical Elementary Particle #2: Harmonic Themes
Sometimes in movies, you’ll hear music without there being a melody. In these movies, you could very well be hearing a harmonic theme. Harmonic themes are basically chord progressions: Two or more chords pressed together in linear time.
Chord progressions have an obvious advantage over melodies: They can easily stay out of the way of the action while still telling the story beyond the story.
Take the score for Moonlight by Nicholas Britell for example: A simple chord progression with a violin. It works brilliantly in this movie, perfectly appropriate for the pace. Another great chord progression that comes in a form of a theme is the opening chords for the Netflix series Sense 8. Those chords are the perfect start for this show. It’s memorable, it’s not hard to follow, and it described the show in less than 10 seconds.
Harmonic themes can be used to unite a movie in the same way that a melodic theme can. They can be used in different ways, orchestrated differently, and describe multiple moods. Also, they are fantastic for underscoring.
In this next main title sequence, I allowed myself only two instruments: A guitar and a piano. Let’s say that this was the first thing a viewer heard when they saw a movie:
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Well, okay. We’ve got the chill and gentle and secret love vibe going. But what else can we do with it? Can I take what I’ve established and create a different vibe using only two instruments? Of course.
For this next example, I switched up the rhythmic duties to the guitar and make it sound more whimsical, but I kept the same chord progression.
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Now if you are a musician and happened to play each of these parts on piano or guitar, you’d notice that I included a sneaky note that is always playing throughout all the chords, either by the piano or the guitar. It’s technically called a melodic pedal point, but you could think of it simply as a single note that is played throughout a progression, no matter what else is being played.
Why can’t I have the guitar play only that melodic pedal point, and have the piano play related chords in a similar chord progression? The result is that it feels a bit unstable and uncertain, perfect for a point of indecision in a film:
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
And finally, if we wanted to have a cue that was extremely gentle, we can use the guitar for something it’s uniquely qualified for: Fingerpicking. Fingerpicking has always had a gentle feeling associated with it. To achieve this, the guitar plays a simple fingerpicking pattern while the piano plays in a gentle way, lightly accenting the music. It’s even more intimate, cozy even, than the others:
Composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Harmonic themes offer a different approach. If you prefer subtlety, if you don’t want the music to swiftly take the viewer on a big emotional journey, a harmonically themed score might be just the ticket. It works marvelously in movies where the pace is slower, the editing is slower, and the audience has time to absorb nuance.
But is that all there is? What if you don't want the grandiosity of a melodically themed score, nor the subtlety of a harmonically themed score? What if you want something more experiential, something more immersive, something that could be downright frightening in some aspects?
Enter textural themes.
Musical Elementary Particle #3: Textural Themes
One of my favorite film composer teams is Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, widely known for their synthesizer-based scores. Though they still make use of melodic and harmonic themes, I highly enjoy listening to their use of analog synths to create an ambient musical immersion into the world of the story they are composing for.
Take Ex Machina for example. Yes, there is a melodic theme in the movie, but at the same time there is a bounty of ambient electronics throughout. Another wonderful score from this composer team is Annihilation. The electronics they used perfectly captured the Shimmer, an expanding void that annihilates and changes everything in the story of the movie. It is a brilliant score. Whenever I listen to it, I am instantly transported inside the film.
Texture can be used to create a sense of space in a movie, one that can be immersive without being overwhelming, one that can bring the listener deeply into a state of being without telling them what to feel.
Cigar Box Noisemaker by AMBO Art
To achieve a unified sound, I decided to use a guitar that my good friend WT from AMBO Art created for me recently: A cigar box guitar that was meant to create strange sounds. I decided to use this instrument and a couple of digital synthesizers to create a landscape we could enter and feel like we were a part of. My intent was to create an immersion into a world that felt deathly and grim:
Since I established that this is a more textural theme, and since I established that sound of the bowed cigar box, why can’t I use it in a more apprehensive, almost combative way?
Similarly, I decided to make the next one be incredibly rhythmic, something weirdly galvanizing, something not totally of this world. It reminded me of a deathly march:
And then, we need our “story” to resolve, right? Well, that challenged me because well, how do I make something like this actually sound more gentle? Or at least as gentle as it can be made?
Here’s what happened:
And just like that, a unified textural theme.
Finding the Best Possible Musical Theme For A Film
Finally we have arrived to the real question: How do you decide what type of elementary particle, what kind of theme is best for your movie's score?
Let’s start with the fact that your movie is unique. It’s very possible that a mixture of each of these elementary particles, or even ones I didn’t present in this post, could be the best way forward. And maybe you, as the director, don’t even need to know this for certain. The only thing we’re all sure of is that the score must enhance the film. It must be appropriate for your movie and support the story.
The best part of working with a composer is that we can help you find and structure the musical representation of the story. We really care about music, and we want to make sure your movie is enhanced with our efforts.
For us composers to understand your movie truly, we have to feel it. We have to know it as well as you do. To be totally clear: We don’t often need you to be able to say exactly what orchestration or compositional technique or chord progression or melodic technique is needed, but what we do need is your view of the film and the story.
To get there, try to be open about what your movie is about, it's theme, it's essentials. Talk about everything with the story, the world the story lives in. Talk about the color, the cinematography, the acting, the editing, and the sound of the production. Talk about how it was filmed, where it was filmed, why it was filmed the way it was filmed, and what you were working to accomplish. The composer will pick up ideas naturally from this discussion. She will figure out an appropriate way forward if you’re willing to talk about your story and your expectations. In short, you’re priming the composer to understand your film before she goes about writing for it.
Once we composers have some clarity about the world you’ve created and the type of score you want, we have to willingly enter the liminal space for ideas. We pay the prices of confusion and indecision. And quite possibly, we might have a brilliant idea hit us that is perfect for the movie on the first try.
If it were me creating your score, the only ideas I would present to you would be the ones that I think would encapsulate and serve the film. For me, the theme must be special, possibly special enough to be remembered, but not so special that it overtakes the movie and the story you’re presenting.
And then, the collaboration continues. I always ask for the director’s feedback on any potential direction because it saves time and frustration on both sides. I’ll send some sketches. I’ll send some rendered videos of the elementary particle in action. I’ll send a quick sample that gives a faint idea of a possible direction. If a director doesn’t like it, then the conversation starts anew, this time with more clarity. I actually love it when I miss the mark because it means I have a clearer direction!
Again, I’ll enter the liminal space, I pay close attention to distant thunderstorms of ideas, I create some sketches. And eventually, I’ll find the right foundation for the score that the director loves. It’s a simple process of elimination.
Once the director and I are united as far as the direction, then comes the fun part: Scoring for the scenes. I’ll use the elementary particles that I’ve established that the director likes, and I’ll create the first scene. Then keep going.
My aim at this point is to build on the ideas with the chosen elementary particles until the score helps the movie become a living beast. I want that movie to become something that looks back at the audience.
The Building Blocks and Elementary Particles of Story
There are trillions of ways of creating a solid, unified score, and they are as varied as the amount of composers actively composing.
You may already have a script that is totally banging… just brimming with that creative energy. Taking time to work with a composer on the most appropriate film score could bring your movie to the toppermost of the poppermost, to quote John Lennon.
Finding the exact right kind of score, one with the correct audio perspective, orchestration, or any sort of elementary particle, can be tough. I’m not afraid to enter the liminal space to get there because I know the embarrassment of riches, the spoils of that in-between space.
Sooner or later, the right elementary particle comes along that can help unify a story completely.
Just like walking was the elementary particle that allowed you to feel how I felt as a junior high schooler desperate to be popular without spelling it out for you, unifying a movie through multiple motifs can create a wonderful experience for a theater-goer. An appropriate soundtrack can aid you in your quest to create a movie that looks back at you when you’re finished.
And lemme tell you: The audience loves a beast.
Please, leave me a comment!
Or, feel free to reach out to me.
More Articles on Film and Music
Featured
Copyright Notices
All music that appears on this article was composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Public performance of the music without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Reading Notes
12-15 Minute Read | Tablet Recommended
Topics and Themes
The Legend of Willie Nelson, The Mississippi River, Flow equals vibe, Vibe equals color, Using color to describe exactly what vibe you want in your film.
All Music Has Flow and Color
There is a legend about Willie Nelson that seriously piqued my interest a couple of years ago. I think it's a legend that explains why his music feel like it does, and it's also murderously poetic.
The legend: If you aren't careful, Willie will take you down to the river and drown you.
And no, the legend is not literal!
This legend immediately struck me as being a philosopher's stone about music. With few words, I think it explains why Willie Nelson is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, why he is just as recognizable as the color green.
Chances are you are thinking of Willie right now as you're reading this, and can probably picture him in your mind. He’s so distinct not just because he's famous and his face is well-known. It's not just because of his stories, the causes he supports, or the amount of weed he smokes. There's something deeper going on...
What is it about Willie Nelson that makes him incomparable, so distinct, so memorable?
The answer lies hidden in his music, which Willie is best known for obviously. If he wasn't a musician and bandleader, we wouldn't know his name! And what makes him so distinct has to do with how he plays his music. In other words, it has to do with Willie's musical flow.
Flow in Music Equals Vibe in Music
Flow in music is vibe. Some records have a vibe that is intense and bright, and others have a vibe that is mellow and muted. Some vibes are clear and transparent, too. Vibe in music is often the only reason we will prefer one record over another.
If you're a filmmaker, you probably already know this. After all, the right vibe is vital to achieve for each scene. If the music composed for a scene doesn't give you the right vibe, well, it has to go.
If you're an audiophile, you've experienced what it's like to listen to a piece of music that just doesn't fit your current mood, even if you had enjoyed it in the past. But if you listen to that same record a day or two later, it hits the spot.
If you are content to listen to a radio station, you've experienced what it's like to hear a song and it just not working for you. But if you’re a radio listener you’re probably used to this feeling and are waiting until the right song comes on.
All of us have had that moment where the right song comes in at just the right time, and it was magical.
What causes one piece of music to be so perfect for one specific moment, when so many others just don't fit?
The answer, in short, is musical flow. Filmmakers who understand the concept of musical flow understand how to select the right music for each scene of their films (if they hired a music supervisor) or how to effortlessly communicate how they want a cue to feel when they’re working with an original music composer.
In this article, I want to help demystify musical flow so you can learn how to pick perfect music (or the perfect composer) for your film, without very much effort.
Lovely, right?
Before we do anything else, we need to define "flow." Fortunately, there's something that is just as iconic to Americans as Willie Nelson that perfectly describes what flow is: The Mississippi River.
Musical Flow
If you were to think of the Mississippi River, how quickly can you form a picture of it? Like most Americans, I can recall it in my mind instantly.
The mighty Mississippi has such a slow flow that sometimes you can't actually tell it's a river. Sometimes we could be fooled into thinking it's a lake. It looks so... calm, right? But don't be fooled! It might look docile, but underneath lies a fierceness.
In periods of extreme rain, the Mississippi will flood entire cities and ruin everything for miles outside of it's regular banks. It's will take down that which took entire lifetimes to build. It can be cruel, without mercy. It can be spiteful, perhaps even jealous. The river has claimed the lives of untold amounts of people. Jeff Buckley quickly comes to mind: He was the great singer and guitarist who decided to go for a swim in the Mississippi and never returned.
And while there are those who are wary of the deep menace of the Mississippi, there are many who will agree that the river is indescribably beautiful. The way the sun shines on it. The way it flows and curls and eddies throughout the landscape. The wildlife that lives in it. The change of seasons on the river. The way it hides many millions of creatures, some that may never see the light of day. The way it conceals many centuries of history, untold amounts of treasures. The way it has witnessed epic adventures and terrifying tragedies. The way it inspired so many artists and writers, Mark Twain being a well-known example.
Wide and portly, stately and graceful, at times horrifying and menacing, utterly mysterious, the Mississippi river is without a doubt the most famous river in America.
What makes the Mississippi an original is no different from what makes Willie Nelson such an American icon. After all, the Mississippi has it's own way of flowing that is different than any other river in the world. The mechanics of flow are similar for musicians. Willie is best known for the way he sings music and plays his famous beat-up guitar Trigger. He is defined by how he plays and interacts with everyone around him musically and how that interaction feels to the listener.
This is flow. I specifically define musical flow as an interaction between a musician and the tempo of the song.
Willie Nelson has a very specific way of interacting with his music that makes him stand out among all other country artists. The Mississippi has a specific flow and vibe because it has a very specific way of flowing with the landscape that surrounds it that makes it stand out among all other rivers.
What am I getting at? This interaction, this "flow," is what defines them. It's the interactions with their surroundings that makes them distinct.
To help you understand this crucial point (and it is crucial because understanding it will help you communicate far better with a music supervisor or composer), I want to walk you through another definitive and iconic musician's flow. This musician is just as original as the Mississippi River. He is just as unique as Willie Nelson, too. He is a one-of-a-kind. In fact, his musical flow is so identifiable that jazz audiophiles can immediately pinpoint him as a sideman on a recording, even if he's un-credited for the gig…
Thelonious Monk - The Legend.
Thelonius Monk, a pianist at the forefront of jazz in the heyday of bebop, was celebrated for his unique and quirky style. When I think of Thelonius Monk, I think of a musician who lived his own splendid way. He was a human being with needs and wants just like everybody else, but more importantly Monk was fully himself at the piano; Thelonious Monk always sounded like Thelonious Monk.
A fun story should illustrate how Monk approached life. In the incredible book Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin Kelley, the author shares a story about a time when Monk was hanging out with his neice, sitting at a piano.
His niece saw that Monk had a Chopin piece on his piano. She said, "What are you doing with that on the piano? I thought you couldn't read music. You can read that?" Monk took the music of Chopin and sightread it perfectly at breakneck speed. His niece, whom he called Teeny, remembered looking at his hands and seeing how they were a blur. When he was finished, Teeny said to him, "You played that wrong." Monk said, "I just played that ten times faster than anyone could!" She replied, "It's supposed to be played adagio, and you played it allegro." Monk loved this sort of playful banter.
Monk, to me, was a trickster. He was playful with his words, his music, and his presence. For those who were down with his particular brand of humor, he was a joy to be around.
Of course, I associate Monk with his music. His truest expression of himself was found in jazz piano. His playing and his compositions have the same quirky-ness of his personality. And for the purposes of this article, I would like to mention that his sense of rhythmic flow sounds like no one else's.
To my ears, Monk plays in a weird way, sort of outside and inside the rhythm all at once, sort of heavy and intense. He is odds with the tempo of the song, almost off-beat sometimes. This might throw well-meaning listeners off, but like his personality, if you can swim in the flow of his rhythm there is much to be had for the effort.
Monk was also challenger of the rhythm. He pushed the rhythmic flow of a song around. If you listen to Monk closely enough, you'll hear a man who is throwing little musical pranks here and there to keep it light. I like to think that he was making sure that everyone knew that this was supposed to be fun. The musicians who were playing with him had to have a sense of humor, too. If the musicians weren't paying attention, Monk would throw them off-beat in an instant (something Willie and Monk have in common).
Monk was definitive. He was completely himself at the piano. He was so distinctive that people who regularly listen to jazz can recognize him instantly. Sometimes his rhythm is... off. Sometimes his playing stuck out like a sore thumb, but other times he played in such a perfectly nuanced way that you feel lighter for the listen.
This is what defined Monk: The rhythmic flow he had. The way he interacted with the tempo set down by the other musicians in the band.
If Willie Nelson has a flow that is slow, gentle, and has a bit of fierceness beneath it (not unlike The Mississippi River), Thelonius Monk has a flow that tricks you and throws you off what you think it will do (not unlike Colorado River through Cataract Canyon, Utah).
This same quality of rhythmic flow is applicable to practically all of the famous, iconic musicians too.
Miles Davis' ultra smooth tone and relaxed ability to soar over the music, to accent it in a superb way. His manner of working with musicians and getting them to go to their edges while he played and led the band was unforgettable.
J Dilla's tipsy and under-quantized hip hop production on his record Donuts leads the listener through an almost perfectly executed record, one that Adult Swim has fully integrated into their late-night animation advertising.
Stevie Ray Vaughn's electric, joyful, and immediately forthcoming guitar playing that inspired my fair city, Austin TX, to erect a 10 foot tall statue (which on sunny days casts a very long shadow).
The Tallest Man On Earth's driving fingerpicking songs that pushes the techniques of acoustic guitar to their very edges and makes us feel alive with joy.
Julia Doiron's incredibly heartfelt and beautiful music that gently caresses the ears with a more thoughtful sentiment, deeply nuanced, gorgeous.
Sequencia's recreations the masterworks of earlier centuries, of which their recording of Hildegard Von Bingman's sacred opera Canticles of Ecstacy being one of my favorites.
What defines all of these musicians is how they interact with the world and the musicians around them. This interaction is crucial. It's the cause of their flow. And from this wellspring comes the overall vibe we feel when we listen to the music.
There are as many different vibes and flows in music as there are musicians who play music. Everyone has a different sonic signature. Some flows feel bright and intense to listen to (the band Melt Banana). Some flows are low and slow (the band Flying Saucer Attack). Some flows are all sunshine and making love (the catalog of the Beach boys in early career). Some flows are insane asylum adrenaline grit (the band Meshuggah).
Flow equals vibe, and some vibes are better for some situations than other. An understanding of flow and vibe, and how you can communicate exactly what you want in terms of both, can give you a massive leg-up on other filmmakers. It helps you make more informed choices on your film's soundtrack, original or otherwise. The only trick is, how can you easily describe what kind of musical flow, what kind of vibe, you want to a composer or music supervisor?
Fortunately for you, it's easy when you use color!
Color as the Best Method to Communicate Musical Vibe
When you start to think about how you could describe musical flow or vibe in terms of color, the discussion can go as deep as you're willing to go. Colors, in both musicians and in art, are endless!
For example, if you were to describe brilliant and passionate vibe in terms of color, what color would you give it? Maybe this color?
Or perhaps if you were to describe a relaxed and beach-worthy vibe, what color would you give it? Perhaps this nice and relaxed color would work?
Many colorists that I know would agree that getting the colors of a movie correct can strengthen the vibe of the movie. I’m immediately thinking of how the most recent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy looked on screen. When you start to think of music as having specific colors/vibes, it's not hard to see how music could have the same effect.
But I have been remiss about approaching a deeper point about rhythmic flow and color in music: What causes some pieces of music to be brighter, or cooler in musical color? What causes one band to be a chill ocean green while another to be an intense red and orange?
The answer lies, again, in musical flow. It's how Willie Nelson interacts with his sidemen who provide the foundation for his playing and singing, it's how Thelonious Monk interacts with his sidemen who give him an audio canvas to paint on.
If you know what makes a band/musician colorful, you would have a greater firepower to give your movies a special sparkle with music, something intensely original and completely and uniquely yours.
Pushers, Pullers, and Anchors and The Rhythmic Color of Music
Defining Rhythm and Tempo
To get you to where you can speak comfortably about the colors of music you want on your film, you need to understand the difference between what rhythm is and what tempo is. Believe me, they are totally different and vital to tell apart.
Here's the high level: Tempo is something that can be measured, like with Beats Per Minute or BPM for short. Rhythm is an interaction with tempo and is something that is felt, like a vibe (hint, hint).
Now, let's go a little deeper:
According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, tempo is defined as the rate of speed of a musical piece or passage indicated by one of a series of directions (such as largo, presto, or allegro) and often by an exact metronome marking.
Tempo is measurable. It's typically marked in BPM, or beats per minute. 60 beats per minute is the equivalent of 60 seconds in a minute. 120 BPM is the the equivalent of two beats per second. 180 BPM is three beats per second, and so on. In classical music, the tempo is given a range but is still measurable. For example, Allegro would be 120 to about 150, and Adagio could be around 66-76 BPM. Though a curmudgeon music theorist would likely disagree with me on the exact measurement of these tempo ranges, I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that tempo is measurable. I'm also pretty sure that music theorists need to get laid more often.
Okay, moving on...
Rhythm can be defined as an interaction with tempo, a reaction, a relationship.
Rhythm is what happens when a human plays along with a solid tempo. Humans are imperfect, and it's this imperfect reaction to a tempo that colors the music, that makes it a specific vibe.
Rhythm is a feeling, an emotion. Rhythm is what makes Willie sound like Willie, no matter what. Rhythm is what makes Thelonious Monk sound like Monk, no matter what. It's the way they react to the tempo of a song. Believe me, rhythm is so important because it creates all the vibe and color in a piece of music.
Thankfully, I can be a little less philosophical and quite a bit more practical from this point forward!
Musicians and their rhythmic flows tend to fall into three camps: Pushers, pullers, and anchors. Willie Nelson, for example, is what I like to call a puller, a musician who tends to create a more relaxed color and vibe through his relationship with tempo. Willie's musical flow is so relaxed even that it can throw musicians who are playing with him completely off and drown them in the river.
Yes, we're getting closer to solving the riddle!
How Pushers, Pullers, and Anchors Create Colors
Flow and rhythm is like an audio fingerprint, something that is completely one-of-a-kind for each musician. Each musician's relationship to tempo is different.
Some musicians are pushers: They are energetic! This music is what you listen to when you're in need of pep, when you want to be swept away by sound, when you need energy. Think of music that drives you forward in some way and keeps you focused.
Pushers are great to have on your soundtrack for your action movie because their bright and intense colors tend to match well with a forward-moving and epic action film.
Some musicians are pullers: They are more relaxed. These are bands you listen to when you want to deliberately chill out, when you want to shut off your brain for a little bit, when you want your body to relax. Think of music perfect for a picnic on a beach.
Pullers are great musicians to have on light-hearted movies, as their relaxed colors tend to match well with the vibe.
Anchors are the third camp of musicians, and their role as musicians is to be stable and transparent. They want to be clear and metronomic. They're not robots, of course, but they find the most enjoyment out of being supporters. They don't push, they don't pull. They are stewards of the rhythm and of the songs they play.
You might think anchors are not worth paying money to, but I beg you not to make that mistake. Anchors are the musicians who keep everyone together and are vital for the success of a song.
Let's go into some more detail!
The Colors of the Pushers of Rhythm
Pushers love to play slightly ahead of the tempo. They want to push it faster. They slice at it like a karate chop, they kick it, they punch it, they work it, and they energize it. Pushers are type A, making things happen, natural leaders, emphasis on action.
Pushers subconsciously wish the song were faster. They feel joy in the moments where the rhythm feels aligned with their high-paced energy. They want to speed up a song to a point where time disappears, to where the music matches the energy that they bring to the music.
Think of a Pusher as having a fiery color. Like the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows:
Pushers are synonymous with rock and roll and punk rock. I sometimes think of The Get Up Kids as a band that pushed rhythm. Their music has energy. They often accompanied me on my way to school in the morning; It’s perfect driving music. Metallica are definitely pushers, and they are still pushing the rhythm and the boundaries. I certainly listened to them for years as a energetic teenager!
On the film score side of things, I definitely think Hans Zimmer is a pusher. His music pushes viewers beyond where they think they can go. He is unabashedly interested in doing big-budget film scores, and he loves to be overwhelmed with the music when he gets into the theater to watch the movie.
Another example of a film composer who is a superb pusher would be Junkie XL. His soundtrack for Mad Max: Fury Road immediately comes to mind. The music is large, intense, and perfectly aligned with the visuals, the colors, and the energy of the story. He was without a doubt the best and most natural choice for the composer for that film.
Pushers love to create and play music that matches their fiery personality. They are bold, courageous, and in-your-face. Their music is full of energy. When we listen to them we are instantly pulled into their vibe. They are the fiery colors that bring a blistering energy to a project.
The Colors of the Pullers of Rhythm
Some musicians are pullers. They pull the rhythm backwards, breathe into it, gently hold it, caress it, and keep it chill.
Pullers of rhythm enjoy what it feels like when they pull back and play slightly behind the tempo. They see the value in relaxing, in chilling out and just playing music for the sake of making things a tad more relaxed. For them, it's incredibly enjoyable to just settle into the beat and help people chill. Their audiences really appreciate it too.
Think of a Puller as having a relaxed color. Like the Greens, Blues, and Violets. This person loves to "paint" a vibe in music that feels chill, cool, and (sometimes) even bashful:
BB King was an puller, with his wonderful and perfectly executed blues lines flowing throughout the blues form proves it. Jack Johnson is another great example. His music makes you want to chill out on a beach and forget about the world for a little while. Though some would disagree, I have often thought of Vampire Weekend to be fronted by a fantastic puller, Ezra Koenig, and though their music is much faster tempo-wise, I think it's more relaxed and enjoyable as a result of him being a puller.
There are plenty of film composers who are pullers, as well. I tend to think of Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, the composer duo that put together the music for Annihilation and Ex Machina among others. Their music wraps the viewer in sound, almost as if you were in a cloud of music. It almost has a sort of gray/blue hue to it.
Another great example of a puller would be Nicholas Britell, the composer for the The King. Much like Britell's earlier work in Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, his work on The King doesn't seek to completely overwhelm and titillate the viewer, which is so often the case with time-period epic battle movies. The music instead seems to wrap the viewer in the atmosphere of the king's experience, which is a great example of character perspective.
The Anchors of Rhythm
What is the one thing that is common to 99% of all paintings?
The canvas.
Both the pullers and the pushers of rhythm need someone to hold them, ground them, and to keep them steady. They need someone to keep the tempo steady. They need a canvas to paint an aural picture on.
Think of that anchor, that transparent drummer in the background, that solid bass player, as providing the foundation for the other musicians to color with. Anchors are obviously human, but they want to keep a steady, metronomic pulse going throughout the music, whatever the tempo is.
Often, music that has no clear anchor sounds disheveled and shocking. I think of my old demo recordings as a high-schooler (I tend to be a pusher of the rhythm. Big shocker there). If a band were 100% made up of pushers, the music will constantly be creeping up faster. If a band were 100% made up of pullers, the music will always be falling back behind. Anchors are the stewards of the rhythm. They guard against any tempo discrepancy. The pulse and foundation of the music is safe in their hands, no matter what the pushers or pullers do.
A great example of an anchor would be Freddie Green, the rhythm guitarist of the jazz big band The Count Basie Orchestra. There's a wonderfully devious story that illustrates exactly how indispensable Freddie Green was as an anchor.
In the early days of The Count Basie Orchestra, Freddie Green was offered the job as the guitarist and he was expected to both solo and play rhythm guitar. There was just one problem: When Freddie Green took a solo, the band fell apart rhythmically. His rhythm was so rock-solid that when the rhythm section figured out how valuable Freddie Green was as a rhythm guitar player, they started sabotaging his amplifier to encourage him to play more rhythm. The Count Basie Orchestra has a solid rhythmic feel to it because of the anchor it had in Freddie Green, and everyone in that band knew it.
Can we say that there is a such thing as a film composer anchor? Absolutely! The anchor film composers are trying to enhance the story with music, of course, but their intentions are not to color it, but to underscore and support it.
The first composer that comes to mind would be James Newton Howard, and though I've talked about it here, his score for The Sixth Sense was perfectly executed. His timing and diplomacy on this (and many other movies he's done, Alive being another great example) is impeccable. Though he lamented that no one paid any mind to the music in Sixth Sense, no doubt that film wouldn't have been as successful without his touch.
Another fine example of an anchor would be Randy Newman, who's work on Awakenings is brilliant. The movie itself wasn't an easy watch, but the soundtrack is a light and airy juxtaposition to much of the content of the story. It neither titillates the viewer, nor does it relax either. It just states a lightness that is well-needed.
Sometimes, the anchors aren't given the credit that is due to them. This is the price of transparency, perhaps. Equally important to keep in mind is that some movies desperately need that transparency. That precise touch can bring a movie together in a beautiful way, a way that allows the story itself to do the talking. Maybe your story needs that transparency, too?
Using Colors to Get The Right Vibe
Before we really come to the climax of this article, I want to take a second and do a bit of review.
Tempo is defined as a measurable amount of beats each minute. Rhythm is an interaction with tempo, something that is imperfect but colors the music played.
Rhythm causes us as listeners to feel a feeling, an emotion, a vibe when we hear that music played. Anchors provide the basic tempo in a band. Pushers and Pullers provide the rhythm in a band, thereby coloring the music.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were pushers in the Beatles, but it was Ringo Starr who held them in check; Ringo was the anchor (and arguably, George was too). Therefore, I would argue that the colors that the Beatles presented were fiery, bright, and ridiculously passionate because of the interplay between John and Paul and Ringo and George. For some reason, I prefer the earlier Beatles records. When I think of the Beatles and their early catalog, this is how I would represent it in color:
Willie Nelson is a puller, but his band is mostly anchors: Bobbie Nelson on piano, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, Billy English on drums, Kevin Smith on bass, and Lukas Nelson on guitar. Willie Nelson's colors tend to be darker because he pulls on the rhythm:
Now that you know exactly how color is created in music, and also now that you know that you can use color as a tool to describe exactly what you want for the music on your film, it's time to get into the practical communication. How do you use color to get the exact vibe you want?
The better you can describe the vibe you want to your composer or music supervisor (or both!), the easier it will be for everyone to be on the same page and the better your movie will be for the effort.
How to Get a Specific Color of Music on Your Film
What is the Vibe of your Film?
To begin, you might want to think deeply about the overall color or color palate of your film. I'm not talking about color correction, mind you. I mean this:
What is the overall vibe you are going for on your film?
You might want to treat it like an elevator pitch. If you had to describe the vibe of your film in 30 seconds, what would it be?
Once you start looking at the overall vibe, you can take a closer look at the colors that would fit it. If you were to assign a bunch of colors to the vibe you chose, what would they be? Would it be bright and fiery, relaxed and chill, or perhaps just transparent?
Let's take some examples:
Mad Max: Fury Road has a vibe of shrill intensity, brightness and dread. It has themes of death, absolute chaos and lawlessness, but also has a sense of redemption and friendship. The movie's colors (just my opinion) are bright orange, sun flare reds, grime rusted metals, oxidized copper, and deep bloody reds. Therefore, the music needs to have the same fiery, gritty, bloody feel to it. It desperately needed to be created by a pusher and Junkie XL was the perfect choice.
Let's take another example: Ex Machina.
Ex Machina's vibe is intellectual with plenty going on underneath the surface of thought. There's manipulation, treachery, and dishonesty too. The colors of the movie are transparent and clear in that technological and intellectual manner, but also incredibly murky and dark in a more subdued and treacherous way. The music needed to reflect this, and the composers Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury delivered. It perfectly mirrors the subdued colors, the intellectual perfection, the looming menace.
Keep in mind that I don't have what it takes to deliver a 30 second elevator pitch that adequately describes the vibe of a movie (and I don't need to thankfully!), but I think you get my point by these examples. Finding the vibe and color of your film can get you to be more informed about how you want the music to feel.
Create a Color Swatch For Your Entire Movie
Let's say now that you do have an idea for the color/vibe of your own movie. Let's say you can describe it in 30 seconds or less. It's time to put together a color swatch that perfectly encapsulates the vibe you're after. What colors will you have on this swatch? Will they be bright and fiery? Cool and relaxed? More towards transparent?
I'll caution you not to include every single color into your color swatch. Overall, you don't want the colors to be too different, or else you're basically painting with too many colors and it'll all end up looking like brown poo. Your color swatch needs to have a consistency to it to keep a good presentation and unify the film musically.
Here would be a possible color swatch for Max Max: Fury Road:
And here would be a possible color swatch for Ex Machina:
What would your movie's color swatch look like?
Colors for Individual Scenes
Of course, having colors for the entire movie doesn't account for the individual scenes. You could take the overall color swatch and find colors for individual scenes using it as a reference.
At times of heightened emotion in your film, perhaps it's best to include a more intense and brighter hue. At times where you want music not to color but to keep the viewer from being pulled out of the movie, you could bring in more neutral colors to describe the vibe you're looking for. At times of real relaxation, like maybe after your story resolves, perhaps you could include more relaxed colors.
But, let's say that you have your overall swatch and the colors you'd like on each scene. Now it's time to communicate this to the composer or music supervisor. The spotting session, aka where you tell your composer what you want, is where the rubber meets the road: Create another copy of your script with color selections, specific to which scene you are describing, and talk about that color.
I'm sure this sounds simplistic to you... And it really should be if you want to communicate something only once. The easiest things to communicate are often the simplest to understand. Plus, there's the added bonus that it will save you money and hours of wasted time if you communicated what you wanted the first time.
If a director took the time to make a color swatch for the movie and all the scenes, my entire job would get 10X easier. Instead of being told, "I want a vibe that is happy but also sad, extremely chaotic and yet spare," I'd hear something like "Here's the color I want this scene to feel like."
Composers are smart people. Once they have a specific color in their heads that the music should feel like, it won't take much for them to execute your vision. They will have fewer iterations, and the entire process would be faster. Your movie will have one less thing to hold it up in post. Nice, right?
Here's the process in short:
Know the color of your movie and be able to describe that color with words in 30 seconds or less.
Encapsulate the vibe of the film in a single color swatch
Label each scene using a color as a reference.
On the spotting session, communicate what you want once, and then watch the magic happen.
Not only is this process faster, describing your movie in terms of color and vibe will help your story stand out from the many thousands of your contemporaries. More importantly, I have a strong hunch that your movie will have more originality.
The Answer To The Riddle
We've come now to the final section of this blog article on musical flow and color. It's time to fully explain the legend about Willie Nelson. Here is the legend, one final time:
If you aren't careful, Willie will take you down to the river and drown you.
Willie is an intense puller on the rhythm. Willie is such a puller that if you are playing music with him and aren't being really careful, he'll play so far behind the beat that you'll lose your sense of tempo altogether. If you don't have a grasp on the tempo of the song, you're done for.
This is what this legend is referring to: Drowning in the river means a sideman has lost his or her sense of the song's tempo altogether. Willie's bandmembers must be on guard at all times or else the song will fall apart.
And really, if you were playing music with Willie Nelson would you want to be anything less than awesome?
Please, leave me a comment!
Or, feel free to reach out to me.
More Articles on Music and Film
Featured
Music is valuable. Very valuable. Precious. Delicate. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who creates music engages in an act that is mysterious, beautiful, and full of light.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that it bothers me when I see musicians doing anything to be heard, like posting their valuable music up on streaming sites that have terrible terms of use contracts, if not terrible privacy policies. It bothers me no one is even reading them!
I was recently getting more interested in posting my music on Orfium.com. Check out this zinger in Orfium.com’s Terms of Use contract (The phrases in bold scared me the most):
3.2 License.
(a) You hereby grant (and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant) to Company an irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform, prepare derivative works of, incorporate into other works, and otherwise use and exploit your User Content, and to grant sublicenses of the foregoing rights, solely for the purposes of including your User Content in the Site. You hereby irrevocably waive (and agree to cause to be waived) any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to your User Content. You grant the Company the right (a) to allow the Company Service to use the processor, bandwidth, and storage hardware on your device(s) in order to facilitate the operation of the Company Service, (b) to provide advertising and other information to you, and (c) to allow our business partners to do the same. These terms are not intended to grant rights to anyone except you and the Company, and in no event shall these terms create any third party beneficiary rights. Any failure by the Company to enforce these Terms or any provision thereof shall NOT waive the Company’s right to do so.
Moral: Reading is fun, and when you read you won't get messed with in the world of legal contracts. Do your research!
Reading Notes
17 Minute Read | Tablet or Laptop Recommended
Topics and Themes
Emotional impact in film, Memory and neuroscience, Priming, Robots -vs- humans, A director's decisions for the best film score, Orchestral sample libraries, Film budgets, Storytelling
Let’s start With something really important to you: Your Birthday.
Your birthday is the one day of the year where it’s all about you. It should be the day where you get what you want, right? I think it’s okay to get spoiled by your loved ones, just a tiny bit.
Let’s say you start your day slowly. You wake up, stretch, lazily walk to the kitchen, and make some coffee. Now, let’s say you’ve fully woken up and decide to check your messages. It is your birthday after all, and people should be thinking about you, right?
From here, let’s insert one of two scenarios, in turn. Let’s say the first scenario plays out like this:
When you check your messages, you find that you've received about 100 birthday wishes, all at once. Let also say that these messages seem a little... generic. Each message is basically some variation of “Happy Birthday (your name here)!” It’s almost suspicious that all of these people know it’s your birthday, but perhaps a bit insane that the messages are roughly the same length and tone. Let’s also say that in this scenario that you only receive these generic birthday wishes, the entire day.
Sounds like a bummer, right?
Okay, let’s put the second scenario into play:
When you check your messages, you see that you have received a text from your best friend. It says: “Call me as soon as you wake up!” You call your best friend. He/she is really happy to connect with you:
“Well, good morning! Happy birthday! Here’s what’s gonna happen: I have conspired with three other friends to make your birthday the best day ever. We have decided that we are going to do everything that you want to do, because it’s your birthday and we want to celebrate you. If you want to go to an amusement park, we’re in! If you want to go to brunch and then a wine tasting, we’re in! If you want to go bungee jumping or sky diving, we’re in! Or, If you want us to scoop cat litter, walk your dog, order you all the food for delivery, and leave you alone, we get it! Were in!
The point is, this is your day, we love you, and we want to pamper you with luxury. Oh, and by the way, you’re not going to pay a dime. We don’t care how expensive it’ll be! What would you like to do for your birthday, today?”
Sounds pretty awesome, right? Now for an obvious question: Between these two scenarios, which one has the most potential for a great memory?
Neuroscience and Memory
Stay with me; I’d like to share an passage about memory and emotion from Dr. Joe Dispenza from his wonderful book Becoming Supernatural:
Emotions are the chemical consequences (or feedback) of past experiences. As our senses record incoming information from the environment, clusters of neurons organize into networks. When they freeze into a pattern, the brain makes a chemical that is then sent throughout the body. That chemical is called an emotion. We remember events better when we can remember how they feel.
Dr. Joe Dispenza, Becoming Supernatural
The gist of this passage is that vividly remembered events are events we had a deep emotional reaction during. In other words, when we have a deep emotional response to an event, we are more likely to remember that moment than not.
This idea begs exploration and some more clarification. Think back in your life and search your memories. What are your most important events in your life? How do you remember them? What emotions did they create in you? Does one event stir you more than another, and why?
Because of how the brain works, how neurons create patterns, how the chemicals in the brain are sent throughout the body, we remember deeply emotional events far more than events we just passed through.
Taking this a little further, every single director I’ve met had at least one movie they could call their turning point. It was the movie that solidified what they were going to do with their lives. After watching that fateful movie, they knew they had to spend their entire lives doing film. It’s a moment that is potent and emotional for them. They can probably recall what they were feeling during the movie, where they saw it, who they were with, and possibly even what they were wearing.
I think it’s more than reasonable to assume that the more a story or a film resonates with the viewer emotionally, the more likely he/she is to remember it.
Chances are, one of the things that made you into a filmmaker is how magical that film was, how you hard you got hit, how deeply it resonated with your soul. Seeing that movie likely make you think, “I have to do my own movies. Have to!”
Then the big question rears it’s ugly head: How do you do it? Just how do you make a satisfying movie? Lets assume that you spent the time to learn the basics of filmmaking. From there, how can you make your movie special, magical, and potent? I’m so glad that there isn’t an answer to this question, because that would take the magic out of movies so fast. But I do think that there is an important point here, lingering on the edge of our awareness, that’s worth exploring further.
What Emotional Impact Means for Memory
Let’s bring it back to the birthday scenes. Between the two scenarios, what was different? In the first one, you received plenty of messages that it was your birthday, but could you trust that a real human being sent each one to you? After all, it’s easy to set up an auto-birthday texting/Facebook/Twitter service. There are plenty of them out there. But, in that scenario, something seems… off.
No matter how many messages you get in scenario #1, real or auto-generated, they will never hit you as hard as the second birthday scenario could. After all, your best friend in the world made your day super special. He/she cared enough about you to tell you what your day could be like, how it could be shaped, how you had the control, how you could just focus on you, and how you didn’t have to take care of anyone else. Someone else was taking care of you, period.
It is my very strong opinion that the movies that we remember are exactly as warm, inviting, and awesome as our best friend doing us a solid on our birthday.
Conversely, it is also my very strong opinion that the movies that we forget instantly are as cold, ruthless, and antiseptic as receiving 100 auto-generated happy birthday well-wishes on our birthday.
The viewers of your movies are no different, also in my very strong opinion. They don’t want to be lied to. They want you to tell them how special they are, and they want you to work hard to make their experience special, too. And frankly, without the viewer, you’re not really a director.
I’m not suggesting that you can’t challenge the viewer, of course. But, if a viewer buys a ticket to see your movie, then it’s your responsibility to be the guide for their experience. It’s your responsibility to make the experience something the viewer will remember, vividly.
The Robot Actors vs The Real Actors
The Experiment
So, what contributes to making a movie memorable? How can we deliver the emotional impact that can make an impression on the viewers? As a filmmaker, how can you assure that your movie has as much potential for being remembered after the audience leaves the theater?
For a start, we can’t lie to the viewers. They are going to know it, and they will shut off their minds to the experience if they aren't convinced. Anything that takes them out of the movie has got to go. And, we certainly cannot try to pull the wool over the viewer’s eyes by covering our asses either: “Take my word for it! That wasn’t a special effect! This is totally real! We actually created a real __________ and it cost us millions of dollars to pull off!”
As much as possible, we have to take care to present a story in a way that lands, emotionally, deeply, viscerally. To get there, we often work with the talent that’ll give us the best take, the takes that will suit the scenes and the movie in general. But, it is in the act of preparation before the scene that human beings can bring what auto-generated processes and robotics will always fail at: Showcasing their humanity.
The process of preparing the talent to have the best possible take is also called priming by Yale professor John Bargh, who is considered an authority on the unconscious mind. Part of his research is based on what happens when we prime the unconscious mind for a better result. The idea is that we frame the experience of the talent before the take happens. We may ask them to feel a particular way, imagine a story, prep them to take something from their lives and bring it to the movie. This is crucial.
When we prime the talent, they can temporarily live in the world of the story. They can act from the world of the story. They play instruments from the world of the story. They feel the same emotions that the characters do from the world of the story. Their immersion into the story creates a powerful gravitational pull to the viewers. Priming the talent on a film can help an audience connect and feel the story beyond the story. The viewers will be compelled to experience the story viscerally rather than intellectually. They will understand the events in a way that defies any sort of rational explanation. They will walk away from the theater still humming from the experience of being inside the film.
To test the idea of priming, that human beings could deliver the story beyond the story better than robots or auto-generated processes, I decided to pit three actors against each other in a race to deliver the most truthful, immersive, and memorable performance. One is a trained voice over actor in Los Angeles, another is a trained stage and film actress in a Austin, and the final actor is a robot.
My hypothesis was that I could prime two trained actors to deliver a more memorable and emotionally impactful performance than a robot. Surely, no robot could possibly beat two trained actors at delivering an emotionally impactful performance… or could they?
The Text Used
Here is the gibberish text I chose for all performances. It means absolutely nothing. This text was auto-generated by a random new age sentence generator at http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/:
Nothing of importance takes the world for granted. We must learn how to lead ethereal lives in the face of stagnation. Our conversations with other beings have led to a deepening of ultra-endless consciousness. Reality has always been buzzing with entities whose third eyes are enveloped in beauty. We are in the midst of a self-aware summoning of will that will clear a path toward the world itself.
The Robot Actors
Two Online Voice Generators
Our first two performances came from two robot actors (I needed some robot variety). The first performance came from a robot voice located at https://www.text2speech.org/
I couldn’t tell the robot what kind of performance I wanted. I couldn’t prime it. I couldn’t ask it exactly what I wanted it to feel like. Therefore, the first performance sounds incredibly flat to me*:
I couldn’t tell the second robot what kind of performance I wanted either. Therefore, the second performance wasn’t really all that much better. By the way, this performance came from http://onlinetonegenerator.com/voice-generator.html:
Because I couldn’t really ask these robots to deliver me a type of performance that had an emotional impact on themselves, there was almost zero chance that their performances would land on me. Aside from a moment of insane laughter, I really wasn’t convinced.
Fortunately, the human actors did way better.
The Human Actors
Real Actor #1: Aaron Steward
Our first human is LA-based voice over artist Aaron Steward. Aaron has a super deep and sonorous voice, and he also has that infectious enthusiasm that I so love and appreciate in my friends.
I asked Aaron to record two passes at the text. Here’s where things got interesting: Instead of just asking him to recite the text as he saw fit, I primed Aaron for each take and I asked him to bring a certain mood or vibe into the recitation.
In the first pass, I asked him to overly sell it. I wanted him to take on the persona of a charismatic cult leader looking for followers. I wanted him to try to pull the wool over my eyes. I found his performance to be creepy! Here is the result:
For variation, I also asked for a different take. Again, I purposely primed Aaron. I asked him to deliver a jaded, cynical, depressed, and slightly angry vibe. The text was unchanged. Here's the result:
It’s hard to deny how a human being can just crush a robot, right? Well, I think I’m onto something, but maybe we should test this just a little more…
Real Actor #2: Dana Wing Lau
Our second human actor is Austin-based actress Dana Wing Lau. Dana is a wonderful actress and human being. She is involved in tons of productions, and she often teaches her craft and shares her secrets of acting with others.
I also asked Dana to send me two different takes of the same text. For the first pass at the text, I primed Dana to oversell the text. I wanted her to be the charismatic cult leader trying to pull the wool over my eyes. I genuinely wanted her performance to creep me out:
On Dana’s next pass, I primed her to send me a jaded, cynical, depressed, and slightly angry version of the text. I purposely asked her this, again, because I trusted that she could tap into her repertoire of skills and deliver a wonderful take.
No surprises here! Her second take was equally as awesome:
Really, this was an unfair… I don’t see robots doing well on auditions anytime soon.
Emotional Impact Comes From Human Beings
When you listen to each of these passes, it's obvious that the human versions land, emotionally. You can feel the hint of jaded cynicism in both of them. You can feel the creepy overselling of the text. Even though our actors are reciting the same exact text, you can feel the differing emotional impact of each pass because they are human beings and they are both great at their jobs.
I’ll be the first to admit that this is a crude experiment. But, I think there is an important lesson attached to it: Though we can get a robot to recite a text, we can prime human beings and set them up to deliver a performance that allows us, the audience, to feel the emotions beyond the words. If they feel the emotions, we will too.
Now we’re getting somewhere, right?
What About Music?
Emotional impact upon the audience of any film comes from humans who are primed and encouraged to bring their own emotions to the table, who deliver their own emotions in their performances, who take part in a story that has real impact upon the lives of the viewer.
Can this idea apply to the music of a film?
Oh my my, oh hell yes.
The technology for creating entire symphonies in a bedroom is available. It’s even cheap to produce a recording! To create a massive-sounding orchestral film score, many film composers nowadays rely upon sample libraries that include tens of thousands of individual sounds of instruments in the orchestra. The trade off is that they also have to program and then manipulate all of these samples so that they can create the score. In other words, the samples don’t come prearranged for the composer. The composer has to reprogram the sample library to sound appropriate for the film.
This small, almost insignificant detail, the fact that composers have to rearrange a sample so that it can be appropriate for a film score, has a remarkably stark effect on the emotional impact of a film.
Stay with me on this.
Before I get into why, we need to jump into a favorite subject of musicians and the online forums they frequent: Sample libraries.
What are Sample Libraries?
If you have worked with a film composer in any fashion, you have seen them use a sample library to create music. Composers use these libraries to create music quickly, effortlessly, and cheaply.
There are many sample library companies, with more coming onto the scene all the time. Spitfire Audio is one. Vienna Symphonic Library is another. EastWest, the library I am most familiar with, is a major player in the space.
Each sample library offers the film composer multiple gigabytes of samples of multiple instruments. Each library can cost anywhere from $0 all the way up to $5000 or more to purchase outright.
Each sample library also comes with plenty of sounds. We have string sections, woodwinds, brass, percussion, exotic instruments and noisemakers, pianos, harps, electronic loops, mellotrons, drum sets, guitars, basses, and many more instruments than that. I will narrow our focus on patches available for the Violin section of the orchestra.
First off, there are probably hundreds of thousands of patches available for violin as a section (meaning 12 or more violinists playing at one time). In EastWest Hollywood Strings for example, there are many patches offering different articulations that the violin section can do. Want a short note? Done. Want a long, sustaining note? Done. Want a glide from one note to another? Done. And as if this weren't totally overwhelming enough, many patches can be modulated, meaning that the note can sound more intense the higher the modulation, and vice versa for lower.
The skill set of creating music with a high quality sample library is required for a contemporary film composer. She must know, understand, and quickly program you a cue that sounds cool using a sample library. As a filmmaker, all you need to know is what vibe you’re after, be able to explain that vibe clearly, and the composer should be able to deliver.
You would think that working with a film composer who only uses sample libraries saves you time and money, but there are some significant trade offs.
It is my belief that a film composer who only uses a sample library to get the cues you want will get the job done quickly and cheaply, but the score will ultimately fail to deliver the true memorable emotional impact upon the viewers of your films. Why? It’s for the same reason that birthday scenario #1, the auto-generated birthday well-wishes, fails to create a memorable experience for you on your birthday.
Further, if real musicians aren’t there to be primed for the task of playing from the standpoint of the story, then the score will fail to immerse the audience into the world of the film. Frankly, I doubt it will leave even a small impression. It doesn’t matter if a composer spent $50,000 on their entire sample collection and spent years making the film score just right. In my opinion, getting real players can beat the synthetic orchestra, just about every time.
So, let’s test this!
Surely, a world class sample library of professionally recorded orchestral instruments would have more emotional impact on a listener than a real musician playing the same thing... or could it?
The Robot Musicians vs The Real Musicians
The Experiment
I created two melodies, one for violin and the other for clarinet. Using a world-class sample library, I created a computerized rendering of the melody for each instrument. Then, I called in the professionals: The musicians who can bring the noise when they need to.
There is a twist, however. For each human performance, I primed the musicians to get the optimal take. Basically, I prepped each musician by sharing stories that helped them imagine what each cue was meant to feel like. I wanted the musicians to feel the story beyond the story, each time, just so that they could deliver that deep story to me on their instruments. If they felt the story beyond the story, I know I would too.
Test One: Real Violin vs Computerized Violin
My good friend and violinist Blake Whitmire agreed to come in and help me out with this first experiment. Blake is a wonderful touring and performing fiddle player in Austin. He’s my go-to player for fiddle melodies. I asked Blake to come in and play the following melody***:
By Dave Wirth. Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
I knew what I was doing when I composed this just for Blake. I knew what kind of take I could get. Once he settled into the recording session, I primed Blake by asking him to imagine a scene before he recorded his next take. Though paraphrased, this is what I asked him to visualize:
Imagine being out in Marfa, TX in December, where the desert dominates the landscape. It’s cold, but not intolerable. You arrived at your rental home, you started a fire in the fireplace, you have all the food you need, the home feels incredibly cozy, and both you and your girlfriend are super happy to be there.
Now, imagine that you and your girlfriend had an amazing first night. You both knocked boots many times, you both feel so much more connected to each other. In fact, I want you to imagine that it was such an amazing first night that both of you refused to go to bed. You didn’t want the day to end!
Then, without realizing it, you both looked out the window and saw the first gleam of a sunrise. Then the sunrise kept becoming more and more beautiful, colorful, and lively. It went through a gorgeous transition of reds, oranges, purples, and finally yellows, before the sun bursted and bloomed into the sky.
Feel this moment and how grateful you are to be there, how cozy it is, how blissful it feels. Now, sell me on this feeling. Convince me that you’re there, but use the music to transport me.
After my story, Blake played in a way that absolutely broke my heart:
Pretty amazing, right? Now, imagine the stark difference, the extreme lack of emotional impact, that the computerized version of the same melody delivered:
Cubase Arrangement of Violin Solo by Dave Wirth
Which has more emotional impact to you? The computerized melody or Blake? To me, I’m team Blake, all the way.
Test Two: Real Clarinet vs Computerized Clarinet
We’ve heard a world-class violinist play better than a sample library. What about clarinet? Thankfully I was able to convince my good friend and clarinetist Shelly Eager, the executive director of Cinematic Symphony in Austin, to come in and go head-to-head with my sample library. This was the melody I composed for the occasion****:
By Dave Wirth. Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
Just like with Blake, I wanted Shelly to approach this music differently. I wanted her to sell me on the story beyond the story. I wanted her to really show what emotions she was feeling. I wanted her and her emotions on full display simply so this music could have that emotional effect. To help her get there, I primed her by sharing a personal story (paraphrased as well):
I remember exactly where I was when my Mom called me to tell me my father had passed away. I was at my old studio, sitting in a red chair, looking at the dark blue walls, guitars strewn about the room, and I was in shock and denial.
After it sunk in that my father was gone, a man whom I dearly loved, someone I could smoke cigars with and have joyful three hours long conversations about entrepreneurship, there was a deep pang of dread and of grief, all rolled into one. On one hand, there was a part of me that was relieved because I knew he was suffering. On the other, I lost a guiding light. At that time, I was unsure how to move forward in my life, how to live on my own.
I want you to remember a time when you felt the same way. Try to imagine and remember that slight pang of dread you felt when you had no idea what you were going to do, but you knew you had to move forward anyways. Remember the shock of the rug being pulled out from under you, how that moment felt. Remember how the grief slowly began to settle in.
I’m asking you to sell me on the sense of broken-ness. I want you to make me feel like you are right there, with all of the dread and the grief, the numbness, that shocking weird feeling of existing when someone important to you was gone. Use the music to transport me there.
Shelly's pass was nothing less than astounding:
When it comes to delivering the emotional impact, I can hear Shelly’s emotions through those notes, between the notes, and I can hear her playing the story beyond the story. She was immersed in the flow of that story, and the music was just a vehicle to express the emotions she was feeling.
Since I couldn’t prime my sample library with the same story, the computerized melody sounds good but lacks the punch and impact of Shelly’s masterful playing:
Cubase Arrangement of Clarinet Solo by Dave Wirth
Which has more emotional impact to you? The computerized melody or Shelly? Well, I’m team Shelly, all the way.
Results? Opinions?
In all of these experiments in sound and emotion, I believe that the real player utterly decimated the computerized version on the basis of emotional impact. The samples sound pretty good, but they still lack memorability. That was because I purposely primed the players using stories that conveyed human emotion, they felt the stories deeply withing themselves, and delivered passes that were absolutely magical.
I think it’s obvious that a real human being can play, interpret, and deliver a customized melody far better than a world-class sample library can. It doesn’t matter if I had $50,000 of samples at my fingertips. It’ll sound amazing, but it will still fall flat, just like the birthday scenario where all you received were auto-generated birthday wishes.
In my very strong opinion, a real human being playing on your film score is like birthday scenario #2, where your best friend makes your birthday awesome.
If you’re still with me, the next question to ask is: Are sample libraries bad?
My answer: Hell no!
Throwing out sample libraries is a bad idea because they are incredibly useful tools. Besides, there are some solid ways to get great sounds. Best of all, you won’t even have to go over budget.
Oh, the nasty B word...
Your Film’s Budget
One reason why filmmakers are more interested in having a film composer use sample libraries only is because it’s more affordable to produce and arrange the score.
As long as the film composer can create music that is appropriate for the story and has a sample library to execute on these ideas, a filmmaker can get his/her hands on a score that will do. Like I said before, it's a natural and normal thing for a contemporary film composer to be able to use sample libraries with ease.
Personally, I love using sample libraries to create mock-up scores that give the director an idea of what it will sound like. It allows me to dial in exactly the vibe that the filmmaker wants to have in a certain cue. As long as my deposit from the filmmaker is in my account, I'm certainly willing to work hard to nail any cue.
When mockups fail is when we are going for emotional impact. To me, and hopefully to you now, they are the equivalent of the auto-generated birthday messages. No amount of programming is going to make them sound lifelike. Why?
Again, I think it's harder for an audience to be “inside” a movie when something feels fake, like a fake film score. We often ream actors' performances for being flat, right? We often get annoyed at shiny special effects at the detriment of the story, right? Well, the same can be said about sample libraries, which were created without emotion, only sound.
This might seem a little insane for those who aren’t familiar with audio engineering and producing records. Recording sample libraries is really intense. For any one sample to recorded, the musician(s) has to play multiple passes at it. Any one specific articulation must be played correctly at multiple volumes and intensities. After that note is done it's onto the next one, playing multiple volumes and intensities. Then onto the next note. And let’s be clear: Many sample libraries have tons of different articulations.
Are you doing the math in your head about how long it takes to record and release a world-class sample library of multiple instruments? I certainly am, and I feel like I’ve aged another five years just thinking about it.
Recording all the music for a single instrument in any sample library is no joke. This is an exhausting task for any musician to do, and it's just about impossible for the musician to play with any emotion during this process.** Emotion is stripped from each note.
There is no way to imprint emotion on all of the notes in a sample library simply because the process is intense. As a result of how these libraries are made, it's left up to the film composer at the user end to organize these samples to land, emotionally, as best as they can.
So, if samples libraries fail to deliver, how can we get that emotional impact we need to make a film memorable?
The Benefits of Recording a Live Film Score
The complete opposite way of producing the score for a movie, one that has a higher chance of impacting the viewers emotionally, is to record the orchestra playing the score live in a professional recording studio and to prime the orchestra before each new cue. Doing this can create an amazing atmosphere because the orchestra can present the musical representation of the story beyond the story.
If you’ll remember back to my experiments above with Aaron, Dana, Blake, and Shelly, I primed each of them for specific performances before they did any takes. I wanted each of them to immerse me in their experience and emotions. As a result, each person delivered a pass in a way that I could feel what they were channeling.
Now, imagine the composer for your film standing in front of the orchestra that you paid for and giving this speech before the musicians record a specific cue in your movie (just go with it):
For this next cue, our main character Simon wants to enter a specific castle, even though there are considerable forces that want to keep him out. When he opens the castle doors, he has to face and defeat two large lions before he can get to the water of life.
I want each of you to remember a time when you were trying to get into music school. Each of you remembers what it was like to audition, right? You had to impress the professor of music you wanted to study with. Your professor was like the lions in this cue, and you had to defeat them before you were granted access to the music school, which holds the water of life.
I remember when I was outside Nick Goluses’ office at the Eastman School of Music, scared out of my mind. I had to impress him! I played marvelously that day, and I got into the school. I studied music there, which definitely held the water of life for me.
I want each of you to remember that time when you were at the gates of the music school, waiting to either be devoured by the lions or rising to the challenge and doing the job right. I need you to grab that energy and bring it here, now. The notes on your page are your way of expressing this emotion to me, and ultimately to the audience of the film. I want you to sell me on that slight pang of dread and nervousness you felt, but then I want you to sell me of that excitement you felt. I want you to convince me that you’re there.
I want you to force me to experience what our main character is feeling at this moment. Let's do this.
Can you do this with a sampled orchestra? Nope.
Film Orchestra Recording Budget Considerations
So, what's stopping most filmmakers from getting a live, orchestral score professionally recorded? Funding. It is often quoted that the recording budget (not the money that goes to the composer) will take at least 15-20% of the entire money available for the film.
I bet you’re thinking, “Okay Dave, I get it. You're telling me that the trade off is that I have to spend an extra 15% of my already stretched-thin budget just to get an emotional impact?”
Well, yes. I am.
Assuming that an orchestral score is appropriate for your movie (which is another topic I'll get into on this blog into the future), yes, you'll have to pay more.
Remember: computers are far less likely to affect human emotions as effectively as real musicians can. Think back to our VO actor Aaron Steward. Think back to our film and stage actress Dana Wing Lau. Think back to violinist Blake Whitmire and clarinetist Shelly Eager. Having human beings playing the music on your project will help your story land.
Does this mean your movie won’t succeed if you don’t have a budget for a professionally recorded orchestral film score? Hardly.
First, you don't even need to do an orchestral score. You could ask a composer to do a synthesizer-based score for you. You could have a composer do just a string quartet score. You could have minimal electronics and ambient sound design throughout your movie, and it could be incredibly appropriate for the story you are telling. Really, it's about what is appropriate for your film.
But, what if you did want an orchestra and couldn't afford one?
Though I'm not fond of the following process, It’s better than nothing:
Hire a film composer to create an orchestral mock up for you, and then have a budget to record specific players.
So, instead of a computer generated violin, budget the money for a real violinist to come in and record the parts professionally. Instead of a synthesized string quartet, hire a real string quartet. Instead of a fake oboist, hire a real oboist. Then, you mix and match the real players with the computerized ones.
When you mix and match those real players inside the mock up score, you tend to boost the emotional impact of your movie.
It’s Important Enough To Fund A Live Score for High Emotional Impact
Your fought long and hard to create your films. Your stories are incredibly important to you. I bet you fought tooth and nail to get funding. I also bet that you fought to get the right actors. To rent the right equipment. To edit it correctly. To color correct it in a beautiful way. To make it as memorable as possible.
Your story is important, and it's worth spending the extra money to create a score that can keep the viewer immersed in the film.
Connecting with the viewers is probably the greatest and most important task on your plate, even if you want to challenge the viewers and possibly get a rise out of them. To get that connection, you have to work hard to help your story land.
If your movie creates a stir, you can find yourself in a position where you can work on projects with bigger budgets. You'll be negotiating with film studios who want to see you succeed and tell a great story. You'll be in a better place artistically, with more resources at your disposal. Keeping the viewer inside your story spells success for you.
Remember your birthday scenarios above. Would you rather have 100 or so auto-generated birthday greetings with little to no human warmth, or an experience that you'll remember for as long as you're alive?
As a composer, I want the viewers to feel the story beyond the story. I want that experience to stick with them, to feel it long after they left the movie theater. I want them to simply walk out of the theater and say, "Holy shit, that was a great movie. I have no idea where the time went. I have to watch that again." That is the best possible compliment I could ever receive as a composer.
Telling the story beyond the story benefits everyone. It’s an investment to care about your story like this, I know. But who ever sets out to make a forgettable movie?
Please, leave me a comment!
Or, feel free to reach out to me.
More Articles on Film and Music
Featured
Footnotes
*I am aware that Google’s Trident would have done a better job fooling all of us (creepy) https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/09/609820627/googles-new-voice-bot-sounds-um-maybe-too-real
**It’s my fervent hope that any musician who subjects him or herself to the process of contributing to a sample library is being paid a lot of money, like the amount of money that would keep them happy for two years or more.
Audio Engineering And Arrangement Notes
Both the computerized and human-played parts were arranged/recorded in Cubase. I used some specific EastWest Spaces II patches for the sake of creating the depth we’d expect from the instruments, as if they were playing a solo in the orchestra.
Finally, I ran all instruments through the Flux BitterSweet plugin, the Waves Shoeps 73, and Waves API 2500 on the master track. I recorded the human players using a couple of superbly cheap microphones.
Copyright Notices
***Clarinet Solo composed by Dave Wirth. Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved. Clarinet Solo score is Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
****Violin Solo composed by Dave Wirth. Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved. Violin Solo score is Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
It’s important for me to make a living as a musician. Working with clients can be… tricky. The philosophy that keeps me out of trouble may seem harsh to most people:
I refuse to collaborate on other people’s projects for free.
Why?
First, the energy is unbalanced. What are they giving back? After all, I love giving energy to making a project better, and I love receiving energy in the form of appreciation and payment. It makes sense.
Second, it’s a bit cruel to myself. What does it say about me if I don’t charge appropriately? I care about creating music that carries the story and is appropriate, so it makes sense for me to charge for that.
Third, if I do something for free once, they think I’ll do it for free again. Yuck!
Whenever I meet with a potential client, I am upfront with them by saying I charge what I’m worth, but that I love to talk and hang out. Having good people to interact with makes me a lot happier as a human being.
It’s so sad to see so many wonderful musicians settling for free when they should be paid a lot more.
Music… Is… VALUABLE!!!
How many articles are out there on this one little acronym, SEO? I don’t know. All I do know is that I have a visceral response to these three letters; Almost immediately, I feel constipated.
When can the woodwind section be useful in a film?
When you have filmed a scene that you feel needs some movement, but the vibe shouldn’t be heavy. You can think of it like having pastoral vibes, not unlike running through a meadow. Think of two kids talking to each other about life, watching the clouds go by in the afternoon. Think two lovers chasing each other through a sunny and sparse farmland. Think youthful dreaming and optimism.
I have often used woodwinds as a color substitute for strings, and often for a balance between other instruments outside of the orchestra. To me, I think one of it’s strengths is in it’s color variety.
Music*
Score**
Budget
If recorded in Austin with me conducting and I was able to contract the right people for the job, this cue would cost an estimated $1,150 to record with live musicians.
Why so expensive for a 10 second cue?
When you buy tiny fractions of time of the musicians, you still have to pay them for even getting to the studio. Therefore, as a filmmaker, if you want to go the orchestral route for your story, think bigger. Getting musicians in the studio for a 10 second cue is much more expensive per capita than getting them in there for 30 minutes of playing.
Light, Colorful, and Rhythmic composed by Dave Wirth. Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
**Score for Light, Colorful, and Rhythmic is copyright and published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
The Epic Cue is very much in vogue nowadays in film music. It’s an exciting, awe-inspiring cue, one that is meant to bedazzle and overwhelm us with sound and fury, like when we see the culmination of an epic battle scene:
Music*
The Score**
Ingredients
Melody
Sustained chord
16th notes
Drums and percussion
Sound effects interspersed for interest and surprise, usually lower than 100hz.
Cooking Directions
Set your tempo to around 130 bpm.
Create a melody that sounds epic, but orchestrate it with either choir or brass. French horn and female ahhhs are favorites.
Create a sustaining chord background, usually with some brass and maybe woodwinds (though woodwinds are probably overpowered by the brass in this orchestration). In the example above, I placed two trombones in an octave from each other, and then I added a French horn choir. The harmony was minimal, as I preferred other parts of the ensemble to do that job.
Create 16th note part. 16th notes can be played by strings (because of their agility and ease of playing) or synths. In this case, I used a pandiatonic string section with lots of measured tremelos, and I created a synth arpeggiator that changed according to my finger placement on an X/Y pad.
Next, add drums and percussion. can be just about anything, but Taiko drums, snares, drum sets, and techno-style electronic drums are super common.
Finally, add of sound effects to maintain surprise. I decided not to add any to this specific cue.
*Epic Cue 1 composed by Dave Wirth, Copyright and Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP. All Rights Reserved.
**Score is Published 2019 Fire, Fire, Red Star Down! ASCAP
I can’t imagine a better name for this effect:
My friend Myrriah Gossett reached out recently to see if I were interested in working on a short, 4 minute podcast contest, and I quickly agreed. Myrriah is one of those producers who can get things done fast, and beyond that is totally relatable and fun to hang with.
After receiving the theme for this year’s RadioRace with KCRW Where The Sun Don’t Shine, we were able to brainstorm and get permission to interview Jeri D. Jeri has an intense story, one that was incredibly difficult to distill to just four minutes. I think we did a good job presenting Jeri’s story.
I don’t want to give a spoiler, but Jeri talks about the time of his life he found out that he had prostate cancer, and he talks about what he had to do to stay alive. Jeri’s story is compelling, to say the least:
Like the music in this story?
Here it is, and for a little while it’s on sale:
RadioRace 2019 : Left In The Dark
$1.99
Music composed for the 2019 RadioRace sponsored by KCRW in Los Angeles.
The music on your film is a powerful tool to deliver fresh perspectives, and believe me: Fresh perspectives are vital. This article goes deep into Audio Perspective, i.e. the music being written from the most compelling perspective in the story. Mastering audio perspective can make your movies far more relevant, relatable, and successful.
If you’ve ever wondered how you can use music to communicate a compelling perspective, this article is for you. Let’s hit it!