Mickey-mousing, ballerinas and the love of a challenge...

The fan came out of the closet today.  No, it didn't tell me it was gay.  That's just how muggy it's getting.  It's not the heat but the humidity that, for me, heralds the arrival of summer…or in this case, foreshadows because obviously we're a few weeks off here.  Either way, it's starting to get uncomfortable and every time I run into one of my neighbors who lives up here on the top floor of our building, he warns me about how hot it gets up here during the summer since we're right under the roof.  "You'd better get yourselves an A/C!"  I keep telling him we have one.  For now the fan is helping fight the heat and humidity just fine.  It's actually quite cool in here and it happens to fit right on my window sill…granted it's the window to the fire escape but still, it's a perfect spot.  Last apartment I was in I had to stack it precariously on my guitar amp and then it barely reached above the level of the bed.

But anyway, I'm not here to talk about that tonight.  That was just to set the scene.  I've still got a lot of work cut out for me film score-wise and I haven't even started on the music for the next scene of "The Life." Now there's talk of extending the first one for submission to Sundance so I may have to crack open that file again and lengthen the music cue for the credits.  Shouldn't be too hard.  Meanwhile, the ballerina scene, Mohammad and I had a chat about it on the phone the other night and shared some ideas.  Luckily, we were right on par with where the music should go.  He was thinking exactly the same thing I had already thought, which is always good.  Plus, we were both in agreement about the need to tie the two scenes together musically as well.  Using elements from the first scene will be easy and may feel like cheating but it makes sense.  Continuity is a great thing.

Tomorrow, I'm also working on adding in a cello part to the score for the sci fi short.  A real one.  Recorded by my good friend Lacy and dropbox-ed up from Philly just today.  I'm just too tired to start on anything tonight though I am looking it over right now as we speak.  Just spent the earlier part of the day polishing off some changes to the last cue (the one that needs the cello part).  The first two are basically done and the third is the final cue of the film, the climax scene as it were.  The third is the longest because it encompasses two distinct scenes and one that sort of has the feel of a montage.  It's also two fight scenes, a chase and an escape all rolled into one.  It's been the most challenging, needless to say.

I think the bulk of the work of this film has been this cue to be honest.  The first two, once I had the sound palette chosen, fell together in a matter of days and then it was just minor tweaks to the placement of hit points, etc.  But this last cue has to hit pretty hard and also has a lot of nuanced things in it.  In other words there's a lot going on and the music ends up being in the foreground a lot.   But I do love a challenge.   The mechanics of a scene like this are mind boggling and scoring it feels a lot like blocking it must have felt.  Tedious.  I don't really want to say much else about the scene itself until the movie is actually done but suffice it to say, I'm not necessarily mickey-mousing (in other words, matching music precisely to the action) but there are a fair few things that do need to line up and several things happen that the music must not so much announce but support.  I was kind of talking about this before when I was mentioning how everything needed to build at the same rate as the action of the scene.  But additionally, exact hit points come into play and one has to alter the music in one of many ways, either taking out elements, bringing elements back in, striking a certain chord, changing the chord progression, varying the rhythm, accenting certain notes.  But also you can't do so in a way that's contrived.  Because that would be mickey-mousing.  Seriously, look that up, it's an actual industry term.

Anyway, enough about mickey-mousing.  I'm going to need to sleep so I'll be of some use creatively tomorrow.  I must always write these entries before sleep.  I'm always going on about sleep.