The May Reel World column is about some of the processes I went through on the score for the film "The In Crowd". The score, as detailed in the magazine (see the full text below), blends elements of electronica and groove-oriented music shaped into the cinematic needs of film. Some films don't need music to be highly structured all the time, but it was my feeling that this film did to keep things edgy. Often, grooves that don't change for long stretches while the action on-screen does, tends to smooth things out and make them a bit more friendly.

Here then are a few examples in MP3 format from the score:

Here is a snippet of the film's main theme, which doesn't appear in the film again for some time. The beats are a combination of a loop, processed with an amplitude LFO pulsing in time with the tempo and programmed drum rhythms. The only live player here is the jangly guitar playing the melody. The odd little ambient loops were created with a program I wrote myself with MAX and MSP.

One of the more aggressive cues in the score. Heavily compressed loops and additional programmed drums blended with synths. Everything gets run through at least one kind of distortion box.

It's the beginning of March and I've been working nearly 24/7 for the last few weeks on the score for a film called "In Crowd". It's produced by Morgan Creek and is currently scheduled for release in late spring or early summer this year. Yesterday was my birthday, and the plan was to spend most of it with the producers and director of the film, presenting them with virtually the entire score for they approval. Typically I would play the score a few cues at a time every week or two. But out of about 25 cues, comprising about 50 plus minutes of music, the producers have only heard about ten of them. Because the film has had a bumpy, troubled path, the producers have had bigger problems than me, which isn't so bad. The director of In Crowd is Mary Lambert, best known for her music videos for Madonna, but she has been making films for the past ten years. Her most successful was the Steven King adaption "Pet Cemetery," which I must confess (sorry Mary) I never saw. Mary has come by numerous times to listen to the score and give me notes for fixes, and has been pretty enthusiastic about the music. But the producers on this film have made it clear that they have absolute final say in all matters musical, so nothing is done until they say so. It's not always that way, but that is the way it is here, so I had a lot riding on the meeting. If they give me the thumbs up I am basically done and ready to mix. If they aren't it could mean that a lot of music will need to be rewritten. Not a great birthday present! You should never leave this much music to be heard at once so late in a project. Fortunately they've been pretty enthusiastic at the previous meetings, and the film has been test screened with some rough mixes of my demos which they've liked for the most part.

I've been having a lot of fun with this film. The movie itself is rather modest, with a budget of around $12 or $14 million (depending on who you ask), and a good looking, though not well known cast. It's a teen thriller, which is a real genre, actually. It's not a slasher/horror film ala Scream, et al, but more of a 'whose gonna do it' plot.

The music is mainly techno/electronica, but with a bow to a few film score conventions such as orchestra. My first approach was to go completely electronica and play against picture - not hitting most cuts or transitions and just going for energy. And while I liked some of the music and motifs I was coming up with, I could see that the film was not being served well enough. So my next step was to start carving out sections of the beats and riffs, and start to create more sparse textures, ambiences and melodic concepts while hitting on moments in the film that needed the emphasis. While I would like to have done something more pure, this became a good balance for the score overall, and one that the producers could grasp. They definitely did not like the approach of solid groove.

My very first step in writing the score was to compose some thematic ideas. These are not meant to play to picture, but were simply experiments into possible themes and conceptual approaches. In all I wrote eight sketches which I played for Mary, the director, as well as for the producers of the film. The response was very positive to most of them, and I believe that five of them became the template for the score. One or two became main character themes, and the others became more incidental music for use in various spots in the film.

This score is very character oriented, with the two main themes attached to the two main characters in the film. I have posted some of these theme sketches on the website along with descriptions of the technology and approach to how they were made. They can be heard at www.reelworld-online.com I started by assembling some drum loops from a variety of sources. I began looking for ways to process them to come up with some new sounds. One technique that I really liked was to take a loop, process it a bit with the Waves Renaissance Compressor to get it sounding nice and loud, and then apply automation data to create a unique kind of pulse.

Studio Vision has (or should I say had) a feature that lets you draw in MIDI or audio automation data in specific waveforms in time to the tempo, sort of like a MIDI LFO. The above example has the audio's volume pulsing in quarter notes with a sine wave in time to the music. I then would bounce the results to another track, which processes the audio with the MIDI data. The result is a cool and unusual type of beat. I've posted it to the website as well to hear. Speaking of Studio Vision, this project will, most sadly, be the last using this sequencer. I started using Vision years ago when they were the first company to add digital audio to a MIDI sequencer, and I've used it ever since.

While the other available sequencers have features and capabilities I admire, I've preferred Vision because of the elegance of it's user interface and it's overall reliability. Yes, it does crash, but it has always seemed to be the most robust of all sequencers, based on observing my studio cohorts using the other Mac-based sequencers available. But now Gibson has come along and rather mercilessly shut Opcode down, stopped all development on Studio Vision, and has refused to communicate with the tens or hundreds of thousands of Vision owners and users who find themselves with orphaned technology. My response has been one of disbelief, sadness and upset. I know this program better than I know most of my friends and I've come to be very close with the people at Opcode who wrote and marketed the sequencer. Vision, to be sure, has a number of weaknesses, and so a commitment to continued development is absolutely essential, including its ability to run on future hardware systems and versions of the Mac operating system. So Gibson can go to hell. I don't have time to shake my fist in the air, I need to work, and I need the best tools to do it. After looking at the state of all the current Mac sequencers, I've chosen to start using Emagic's Logic Audio. And in all honesty, it looks great. I was able to meet with the developers of the program and show them some of the features of Vision that I will miss, primarily interface items. They seem eager to woo Vision owners and have made plans to implement versions of some of those features, for which I am grateful.

As for my meeting with the producers of In Crowd, they came late and had to leave early, so we only played a handful of cues. Some went over great, but they are still a bit gunshy about an electronica score, so I'm cutting back on it a bit more. Reluctantly. They're back in a few days, and at that point I think it will be finished, then time to mix. I may write some about that as well next month.

Last month I wrote about my score on a film called "In Crowd." I finished it up last week, finally. Took a couple of weeks more than expected. I had a very leisurely schedule, which most composers would kill for, myself included. The problem with a leisurely schedule is that they keep recutting the picture, which means I keep re-editing my music. With this film, the issue was one of content. The movie was originally intended as an R rated film, and erotic thriller with some steamy moments and some course dialog. It was an integral part of the film, not especially exploitative. In fact, much of the sex and nudity was not particularly erotic, but done in a way that could make the audience uncomfortable by what was going on in the story. I liked that about the original script and story line. But when the film was tested with recruited audiences, it tested much better with a younger, high school age group, and so the producers decided to recut the film into a PG-13 version. That meant quite a few changes, and I had to follow suit.

Picture changes are a matter of fact part of my life. They always come up, and much of it is directly attributable to the technology of non-linear editing, such as the Avid. With film, there is considerable effort to make changes, so they are not done on a whim. Avids are just like MIDI sequencers or audio editing programs - you can chop and rearrange a scene any way you want with a click o' the mouse. And so producers and directors become keen to see a scene as many ways as possible. I feel for the editors who must recut and recut every conceivable "what if" scenario that is thrown at them.

And so it continues down hill. Every time a scene is changed all the sound editors and the composer must reconform their work to accommodate the new version. And now this goes right up to the last possible moment before the dub when all the audio must be delivered. I'm currently doing work on the new Mission Impossible 2 score, which has begun predubs (in which the dialog and effects are mixed from hundreds down to a few dozen tracks) and will start dubbing in just a week or two. The editors have just started to lock reels now, and only the first part of the film. And there is every likelihood that there will be more changes again. This is nearly absurd, and puts the composer and other editors into a tight bind. Everyone must get help in order to finish the project on time. So the scope of a film does not directly relate to how well organized and well produced it is. It still can come down to the last possible seconds.

With In Crowd I was having a difficult time getting the producers from Morgan Creek, the production company, over to my studio to approve the last batch of cues. I was very unhappy with elements of my score after attending one of the test screenings. It is so different hearing your music in a large movie theater with the movie up on a big screen. I sat down afterwards and gave myself about 20 pages of notes and proceeded to rework major parts of the score that were not to my satisfaction. Even though the producer and director were pleased with these cues, I was not, and so I made subtle and not so subtle changes to improve the overall feel of the score.

When I finally did get the producers over, things went well, in general. Mary Lambert, my director, is a music fan and really likes the score. Whenever she would come to my studio to listen to music we would play it very loud, even turning off dialog to focus on the music. But the producers were just the opposite. They not only wanted to hear the music "in perspective" but prefer having music very, very quiet. Now I understand that this is an aesthetic, creative choice that they can make. But never having heard the score before, I was surprised and a bit upset by the fact that they played the music so incredibly low, that virtually none of it could be heard. One producer was forever asking me to "turn it down, turn it down!" (Meaning the music. And the quieter the music the more he liked it and signed off on the cue. Well, fine. The next time I had them over, I rigged a fader that sat on the couch that the producer could use to adjust the music to the dialog, which was a fixed level. This toy made him so happy that he just approved most everything.

By the time I was done with playing back for the producers, it came down to only two spots they didn't like - a total of about 30 seconds of music. Instead of arranging another meeting with them at my studio, I made some fixes and sent them over to the producers office on video tape, with the music mixed at the appropriately very low level. In one cue for a fight scene they wanted something more "Hollywood-style action" while I wanted to go pure groove. In the other cue, they had asked me to make something very emotional and had made a reference to "The Scarlet Letter." I probably took them a bit too literally, and went a bit over the top with it. I scaled it down with just a vocal and low strings and came up with something they liked.

It took two rounds but I finally got them to sign of on the last of the music. I could kick into mix mode. It took about four days to get all my sequencer tracks recorded into ProTools to take into the studio for mixing. The mix itself took five long, long days. Alan Meyerson, my esteemed engineer, did a fab job on it and made everything sound great. I wanted a "low-fi" score, with most parts sounding as though they had been run through an old transistor radio. This does really work for a whole score I found. We compromised a bit so the score could retain some sonic impact and have a sense of size appropriate to a theatrical film release.

It's so great to have a good set of ears listening to my music and helping make it better. Having the whole score in ProTools also let us make last second tweaks to fix some timing and performance problems. We mixed to 12 tracks and delivered them to my music editor, who then had to recut several cues because while I mixed, they recut the film again. Fortunately he did a great job, and in most cases I couldn't even tell where the cuts were made. And life goes on...