Film Score = Done!

I just submitted the final mixes for the film score to my dropbox so that Mohammad can download and listen. Tomorrow is the deadline for online submissions to Sundance Film Festival, the first of many that he intends to submit to.

So, I'm pretty psyched about that and pretty pleased with my final cut of the music. It's been a great project to work on and has taught me a lot. I especially enjoyed working with another musician again. My scores for Boyce Returns (2008) and Solstice (2007) both included my friend Jon on the clarinet but most of the other scores I've done, I worked alone on even if they were collaborative scores like Zero Sum Game (2008) and Peeper: A Sort of Love Story (2009). I was just responsible for my cues and the other composers either were working before I came on to the project or were working simultaneously on their cues.

Anyway, there's a dynamic nature to the piece when you have another mind come in to interpret what you've done. On this score, in particular, there were ideas that occurred to me only after we had recorded the first few takes of the oud (sampling his performances and mangling the results to create atmospheric sounds, for example). Add on top of all that the fact that we had our oud player improvise around an idea that I wrote. You almost never know what you're going to get in that case. All you can do is set a mood and hope that it works with what's on screen.

And in this case, as with Solstice, I was writing the music before the film had even been shot and continuing to work on it after the shoot and well into the editing process without even having seen the scenes I was scoring. Luckily, there wasn't too much that had to hit at the right time, so it was easy to conform the piece to the action on screen after it had been written. But miraculously the key, the tone, the mood, the tempo, everything fit perfectly when we saw it with the scene. I can't wait to be able to show everyone a finished product.

Right now, it's rainy and muggy in New York and I just finally dealt with a fly problem we were having out in the living room. It was apparently due to the window being cracked open at the top, unbeknownst to us. Our window is uncomfortably close to the recycling bins down on the ground level, so that explains the high number of flies and why they were wafting up to our level.

Either way, it feels good to have a clean apartment and a clean slate to get to work on some of my next projects. I do want to write a choral piece again and I have tons of other unfinsheds and as yet to be writtens floating around the apartment and the inside of my brain. But I've also thought it might be nice to try and find some more film scoring work. I'll probably focus on the choral piece first though because it's always good to know when starting a piece that there's a high probability that I can get it performed without too much financial investment.

So, I'll be updating as that progresses. For now, I'm too tired to think of anything else to say...imagine that. Me. Tired on an overnight shift.