Days in the Life of a Film Composer

For the past eight years I've held all of my banking accounts for my business with Chase. It used to be BankOne but Chase took over about four or five years ago. For the majority of that time they've been alright. Nothing I would write home about but a decent place to hold my money.

Lately though that hasn't been the case.

I think the most egregious policy they practice is holding all my deposits for five days before they are credited to my account? Why? Did I deposit a bad check once? Screw them over some how? No. They have just adopted a policy of automatically not trusting their customers and so every check I deposit has a hold on it which lasts five business days.

Now, I'm a small-time business. I don't have many deposits and when I do have them I need them available to me. I'm a very slow business and all I ask is that my bank keep up with me. It seems like a reasonable request.

Chase either can't or won't and so I'm switching.

But even though that's plenty a good reason to switch...there's more.

Sometimes they lose my deposits all together. The first deposit they lost occurred last year. Then another last month. That one really screwed me. I had written a paycheck to myself and paid a lot of personal bills with it. Then when Chase returned it citing insufficient funds (because they lost my deposit) it threw my personal accounts into chaos. I had to call Chase, track down the money, then convince the bank holding my personal accounts that it was Chase's fault because they lost the deposit. It worked out in the end but not without a lot of headache.

The one good thing that happened from that experience is while I was at A+ Federal Credit Union (where my personal accounts are held) trying to sort out Chase's mistake, the counselor I was speaking with said, "You do know we offer business accounts now, right ?"

"Uh, no." I tried back in 2000 but they didn't offer business accounts so I went elsewhere. Apparently it's a brand new thing with A+.

Great! I'm moving my accounts over. Case closed. A+ has been fantastic w/ my personal accounts. I'm thrilled to be able to take my business accounts over there as well.

So that's what I've done. I got my new account with A+ open, new checks and debit cards ordered, internet access activating, and I can be assured that when I make a deposit, the money will be there immediately just like when I deposit a check through my personal accounts.

It's a pain-in-the-butt to switch over accounts but it'll be worth it.

Oh, and what happened after I opened up my new business accounts with A+? The final deposit I made into my Chase account had been lost.

A fitting end.

I should've posted this a little earlier but I've been far to busy wrapping up the BSD score to do much posting on my blog. Nonetheless, this is really cool news. A film that I wrote music for way back when, cicadas (2000), is airing on PBS in New York City. Actually it aired twice already this past weekend and will air again one more on Wednesday.

This is Kat Candler's first feature film and the project in which we first met. I thought it was a brilliant film from moment I saw the first cut back in 1999. The film has done well for her picking up awards and screenings at festivals across the country. This is the first major broadcast of it and a good one at that.

I composed about six minutes of music for the film. It's all surrounding the cello which the lead character plays. I wrote all the music she "plays" in the film and then scored the final scene w/ solo cello. I came onto the project rather late when Kat was needing somebody to compose cello music. I had just moved to Austin when I did this. It was my first feature film credit and one I've been very proud to this day.

cicadas
Screening on PBS in New York
Saturday, 7/19, 11:55pm
Sunday, 7/20, 4:25am
Wednesday, 7/23, 12:30am
WNET, Reel 13
http://www.bside.com/films/cicadas


And here's a quick blurb from Kat herself about the upcoming broadcast.

Long ago, I made this feature film called, cicadas. We shot it over the summer of 1999 in a tiny, tiny town called Bertram (population 835). We shot the film on a Canon XL1 back when mini-DV was brand spankin' new. Over 6 weeks, Thursdays through Sundays a cast and crew trucked out to the middle of nowhere Texas to make a story loosely based on a crush I had at age 16 on a skater punk kid.

The summer of 1999 was one of the best summers of my life. We had no expectations, no grandiose ideas of making it big ... we just wanted to make a feature film just to learn how to do it. And what came out of that little film was a family of friends, a super fun summer and a little movie that could.

The film went on to win some audience awards at festivals, get picked up for distribution and then dropped by distribution. And then picked up again for distribution.

If you have friends in New York who like to stay up crazy late or can record stuff to their VHS or DVD players, pass this along. It's fun to share your heart with people. Even if it's super rough around the edges and frayed along the hem line.

Congratulations Kat!

I've just approved the final two mixes that Matt completed last night. Harry (the director) and Tom (the sound mixer) are going to start wrapping up the film mix this morning so I'll dump these two last cues on a flash drive and head over there. After that I'll be done. Another chapter closed.

For the next several days I'm going to take a break and spend time with my boys. I've seen them probably an average of thirty minutes each day for the past three weeks. We've got a whole list of fun things to do which we're going to start to tackle today.

Let the fun begin!

Wow! It's been more than a week since I last posted. So what the hell has been going on?

A lot!

The week leading up to the recording session was one of the single most intense working periods of my career. That said, the week to follow wasn't far behind.

Last weekend we had two recording sessions for the BSD project. We had a nine hour session last Friday followed by a five hour session the next Saturday morning. All went well with both days and we got some really killer performances and recordings. I sent all the tracks up to Matt in NYC so he could record the percussion and drumset parts and then mix everything together. We started to get the mixes back and they were sounding great!

However, the two cues that we recorded on that last Saturday session weren't quite there. Our ensemble was certainly fatigued and you can't blame them because they had put in a lot of hard hours in the recording studio. But still, the last two cues just weren't up to the level we had hoped performance wise. Making matters even worse is that these were the last two cues of the film: the finale, and the end credits.

Our options were limited. Working with the finale cue, I first tried excising the parts that were most egregious which really didn't leave much left. Then I tried blending the quartet with sampled patches I had and that was getting closer but still not quite right. Then I tried removing the quartet tracks all together and just working with what was left. Then I tried patching together sections of preexisting cues. Nope. Nothing was working. Harry and I spent almost all night last Tuesday trying to salvage the recording any way we could. It wouldn't have been as big of a deal if it weren't the end of the film. This clearly is one of the most important cues of the film. It had to be great if not the best cue of the entire documentary.

One spot of good news was figuring out that we could just edit a preexisting cue for the end credits. The credits cue was based on it anyway just at a slower tempo. We didn't feel like we necessarily needed the slower tempo so we decided to cobble it together from the previous cue itself and it worked great.

One check in the box fulfilled. Now, it's just the finale of the film we had to worry about.

Running out of options we both knew what we had to do. We talked about hiring the quartet back so we could finish up the final two cues. It would cost us more money and more time but we wanted the score to be great from start to finish so we were prepared to do that.

Next problem...Our quartet is not available and neither is our engineer. OK. Now what?

Well, the solution was I was going to sequence a new cue without the string quartet tracks using piano, marimba and vibraphone samples. We used a lot of percussion in the score anyway so hearing these instruments come in at the every end of the film wouldn't be that much of an aural stretch. To make it even smoother I decided to reorchestrate BSD-M06, which was previously written for all pizzicato strings, using the same percussion ensemble orchestration I was going to use for the finale. That way at least these instruments make an appearance earlier in the film and don't just pop in at the end. The decision to reorchestrate one earlier cue would help keep the whole score cohesive.

To seal all the new percussion parts together we hired Javier to come in and record two violin tracks over each cue. The presence of strings here, although not the entire quartet, would help keep the sonic continuity through the score.

I spent the last two days composing the two new cues and we recorded the two new violin tracks today in my own studio. I just finally uploaded them to my FTP server for Matt to download and begin mixing. They're both due tomorrow morning at 9:30AM where they're going to mix them into the film so he's going to mix them through the night and I'll get up in the morning to take a listen, tweak, and approve the final two mixes.

Once that is done, we should be finished with the score for the Barnett Shale Documentary. I keep thinking that this is the last night I'll be working on this but I really think now that this will be the last night I'm working on this. It's been long, hard, and arduous, but very fun and I've really enjoyed every sleepless minute of it. I get a rush out of this job and relish the moments I get to experience such a tidal wave of creativity.

I'll have more post-scoring thoughts later. But for now, it seems I may be done. Just approve the two new mixes and that's it.

The rest of the score is mixed into the film and Harry said it's looking and sounding fantastic. That's awesome! I'm going to go by the sound studio tomorrow to take a peak at the final mix. I'm looking forward to reaping the fruits of all our labor. It should be quite good.

I just found out that COWBOY SMOKE has just been nominated for BEST WESTERN and BEST FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY (what? no best score???) at the 4th Annual Action on Film International Film Festival which takes place July 25th through the 31st.

COWBOY SMOKE will be screened at 10PM on Wednesday, July 30th at Laemmie's One Colorado at 42 Miller Alley Old Pasadena, CA 91103.

Congratulations Will! Let's hope these noms turn into wins.

Fifteen hours. That's how much combined sleep I've had in the last five days. I slept 4, 4, 2, 5, 0 hours each of the last five nights respectively. I've stayed awake all night before but going so long on so little sleep has been a very new and strange experience. Pleasant is not one of the words I would use to describe it. In fact it feels a little like you're walking around with a boulder on your head and rocks in your stomach.

That said, all of the hard work I've put into the past couple weeks has paid off. Last Thursday we had a rehearsal with the string quartet in San Marcos. I only had about two-thirds of the music ready to go but it was a very fruitful and productive session. We spent about four hours going through the pieces and getting accustomed to the music and working out all the kinks.

Then it was back to work where I wrote two more cues. I decided to end the day early and try to get at least four or five hours of sleep because I knew the next night, which was my last night, could be an all night.

The next morning was the first day of recording. It was the only full day on our schedule. The quartet arrived at Electric Larryland around 9:30AM and we recorded all day until about 6PM. Fatigue was an issue the later hours of the day as performances were starting to wobble but for the most part they rocked out! I wrote some fairly difficult music but they didn't flinch.

My quartet was comprised of Javier Chaparro (who was my violinist on RIDE AROUND THE WORLD, and COWBOY SMOKE), Lynn Ledbetter on second violin, Brian Gum on viola, and Michael Werst on violoncello. They were fantastic and did an amazing job realizing the music.

So what was next after a full day of recording? Home with kids? Relaxing with a movie? Sleep?

None of the above. How about go back to my studio and write for the next fifteen hours? Hey! Sounds like a plan!

And so that's what I did. I went back to my studio to get the last four cues finalized. Two of the remaining four cues were in progress and two of them, including the finale sequence had yet to be started. I had my work cut out for me.

In the end, at 8:47AM, which is thirteen minutes before the start of our recording session, I finished up my score for the BARNETT SHALE DOC. Since I was the embodiment of the walking dead, my wife graciously drove me to the session. I was in no condition to drive. Close my eyes for mere seconds and I was going to fall asleep.

I'm going to wrap up my thoughts on today's session and the conclusion of the composing and recording process tomorrow. I got home this afternoon and took a four hour nap which honestly did absolutely nothing to make me feel any better. I'll be heading to bed early tonight and hopefully after a long night in deep sleep maybe tomorrow I can catch up a little bit and feel more like the human I once was.

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;a;kj s adjkfkjljklfads f ;s.d,m f fflkjf 2wkj3uut....

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I've got roughly forty-five hours to go until the BSD score is due. We start rehearsals at 2PM on Thursday in San Marcos, Texas. Actually, if I wanted to write a cue or possibly two Thursday night it wouldn't hurt the group terribly not to have rehearsed just two pieces of the whole score before Friday. But I'm not counting on that. I would very much like to be done with everything in time for our rehearsals.

Why?

1). I want to be able to sleep. I won't be doing hardly any, if at all, before Thursday.
2). I want the ensemble to have played through each piece so we can work out any kinks outside of the studio.
3). I want to be able to sleep.

So where am I at?

Harry came over last night to hear ten of the fifteen completed cues. Of the ten I played for him, two were approved as is. Not as high as I hoped but honestly, those were probably the only two that deserved to be fully approved. The one thing I like about working for Harry is he pulls my best work out of me. When it's not my best he knows it and then I know it.

A few cues only needed a few tweaks, for example, a patch carved out for dialogue, an adjustment in tempo, and several of them just needed to be bumped ahead in the picture about four or five seconds and then tweaked to fit a little better.

One cue, BSD-M06 was flat out rejected all together but interestingly enough we played it over one of the scenes in which I had not done yet, BSD-M14A, and it worked perfectly. That means that cue that I had not done is now done and the one I thought I had done is now not done. So, I have to do it.

I stayed up till about 2AM last night incorporating the tweaks, rewrites, etc. and even managed to compose a new cue, BSD-M14B "Pipeline." This afternoon I wrote BSD-M05 "Earthquake Machines." Harry is coming over again tonight to hear all the rewrites and new cues.

I really feel like I'm in the home stretch. I'm just about approaching "the wall" though. I may have to stay up all night tonight finishing everything. Harry will probably come over again tomorrow to evaluate everything and it really has to be close to being done. I've been composing straight into Finale so the scores are nearly completed but I will still have to do part extraction before Thursday. That could be an all-nighter. Usually when I do an all-nighter its for score prep and part extraction. That's kinda hellilsh. Your hours are waning, you're running on no sleep, and you're tasked with pure labor. Nothing creative...just work. That can get hard.

Tonight I'm also missing the Austin premiere of HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY (2008) with Guillermo del Toro, Doug Jones, and Ron Pearlman in attendance. Ya, that really sucks but the duties of a filmmaker come first!

Back to the grind...

I've probably set a new personal record for minutes of music written in a week. I might have actually come up with more by purely sequencing the cues but the fact that these are all written by hand and set into Finale makes it especially triumphant for me. I've been putting in the hours and so far it's showing.

In the last thirty-six hours I've composed two more cues but these are both more lengthy than the average for this film. One clocked in at over two minutes and the other at about three and a half. These are the two new ones.

BSD-M06 "The Best Wells"
BSD-M09 "DFW"

BSD-M06 utilizes a multitude of arpeggiated flautando figures tossed around the different string parts while they also take turns sharing a pentatonic melody. This cue accompanies a scene where engineers are analyzing seismic readouts that are all color coded. The screens are littered with a rainbow of colors. I tried to capture this with a very "colorful" piece of music. The harmony is changing a lot and the textures change frequently as well although the same basic melodic fragments stay largely intact.



The next cue accompanies a great sequence featuring the DFW Airport. Not only is this piece the second longest but I also wrote in in fast 6/8 which means a lot notes! I'm really happy with it though. It cycles through a lot of material but is pretty cohesive on its own. The main figure is a cascading 6/8 repeated note pattern that creates that sense of extreme business and energy.



Now there are only five cues left. I've started two of them and the other is the completed draft of BSD-M01 which Harry liked but may want me to rewrite to incorporate more of the material I've written up to this point. I may need to start from scratch on that one or just rewrite parts of it. I'm not sure as of yet. That only leaves two cues which I have not made any progress at all with. I think I'm in pretty good shape. We start rehearsals on Thursday afternoon and we'll record all day Friday and Saturday morning if necessary.

I have a feeling I'll still be writing something Thursday night but for the most part, I think I'm in pretty decent shape to wrap it up in time.

It's pretty late but I'm very satisfied on my progress for today. I even took a break around dinner time to join my family for dinner and then for fireworks in Round Rock. After the show I came back to my studio and worked for a few more hours. In that time I got two more cues done.

BSD-M08 "Not All Rainbows"
BSD-M13 "Water Gun"

These two cues exhibit the challenges faced by everyone involved with drilling the Barnett Shale. Although the film tries to reveal the positive effects drilling will have on the citizens of Ft. Worth (and ultimate everyone else in the country), it realistically confronts the disadvantages and challenges that they have to overcome.

These two cues are quite a bit different than everything else I've done. Instead of something very rhythmic and exciting like all the other pieces, these feature a push/pull motive between the high and low strings to help capture the ups and downs, successes and failures, highs and lows, and back and forths of drilling the Barnett Shale. It's not always rosy but it is victorious.



The later piece is the more developed of this material. The section above bookends the piece while there is a flurry of descending quarter note figures that get passed around the various string parts. It climbs back up towards the end only to reach a quiet climatic return to the open high/low chordal figures.

That makes eight pieces done. There are fifteen. As far as the number of cues go, I'm over the half-way mark. As far as number of minutes go, I'm not. There are several three and four minute cues still lingering. I thought tomorrow I should tackle the four minute piece. It's the longest. It would be a psychological victory to get that one out of the way.

Now time for a few hours of sleep before I return first thing in the morning. I'll probably dream of string quartets.

Here I am on July 4th. The family is at a friend's house swimming, eating steak, drinking beer and I've been here in my studio all day working. Eh, that's OK. That's the life.

In the past twenty-four hours I've finished up two more cues for the BARNETT SHALE DOC. They are...

BSD-M10 "The Four Sevens"
BSD-M12 "Rock Fracture"

I'm quite happy with both. "The Four Sevens" accompanies the interview with the four ranking officials of The Four Sevens Oil and Gas Company. It's a kinda bluesy and quirky piece with some slightly raunchy violin solos. Being the subject of the piece is The Four Sevens I of course had to set it in 7/4 time. This is one that the performers will really have to express well to pull it off.

"Rock Fracture" is the third of three pieces which develop the "drilling" theme that I posted on the previous entry. This one takes the theme to it's most developed state as they talk about pumping water into the shale to fracture the rock. There's a cool 3+3+2 section that I think is some of the best stuff I've written for the doc yet.

I'm going to keep going and on Monday I'm going to play everything I have for Harry. I need to have as much done of it as I can. He still hasn't heard anything since that first session so I'm just running with the feedback he gave me and trying to get as many of the cues approved on the first pass as I can. I don't want to be bogged down with tweaks and edits until the end. Otherwise it'll slow me down and prevent new stuff from being written.

I've still got a long way to go and although I'm making good progress I still won't be able to finish without pulling some all-nighters (a situation I'm trying to avoid if possible).

Happy 4th of July!

The ball seems likes it's rolling right along. After a massively inconvenient hiccup with the computer I think I've got the flow of creativity going again. I've written two cues since getting back on line and I hope to finish up another one by tonight before I go home. It's writing rather well and I'm quite happy with it so far. I'm still taking my time concerning myself with the tiny details of each piece. I may have to push down on the the accelerator by the start of next week but for now, I'm writing music I'm proud of at a fairly decent pace.

So far the cues I have done (barring Harry's approval of course) are:

BSD-M02 "Library of Congress of Cores"
BSD-M03 "Very Very Small"
BSD-M04 "Horizontal Drilling"
BSD-M07 "Slow Curve"

I've got a few more started and are in various stages of progress.

Here's a clip of the opening of BSD-M04. This is the "drilling" theme so to speak. In the documentary when they speak of the technology behind horizontal drilling, this is the primary theme that comes in. I tried to give it an mechanical elegance. It's very rhythmic and machine-like but I tried to keep it graceful as well. Such is the miracle behind horizontal drilling techniques.



Gotta get back to work.

It started last night. I was just getting started on a new cue for the BARNETT SHALE DOC when my MIDI starting acting all wonky. Sounds were cuttin' in and out and then Finale and Digital Performer crashed on me. Next thing I knew neither would open. They would both crash on startup while initializing MIDI. I also lost my MIDI interface and hard drives which were all connected to my firewire ports.

Here we go. It never fails. Got a project due? Then it's time for your equipment to malfunction. Not a month ago when I didn't have much to do but now when you've only got a few days to go until your score is due. Yup. That's good.

I spent three hours last night staying up until about 1AM trying to fix the problem. No luck. The need to throw-up was swelling inside me. I had to give up for the night and try again in the morning.

After a couple more hours this morning still no luck. I called Harry and told him what was going on. I also called a repair shop and set up an appointment to bring my machine in to have it looked at.

Then, a faint ray of light. I got my MIDI interface to work...briefly.

After reinstalling the OSX combo updater (to refresh any firewire port software) and disconnecting the drives the MIDI interface came back on for good. To make a long story short I figured out it was a bad firewire drive causing all the hubbub not my computer's firewire ports. The drive contained all my libraries and samples that I use when composing. I didn't necessarily want to lose the drive but just about everything on there I could reinstall from disc.

This morning I bought a new firewire drive and brought it in. It mounted without a hitch and purred like a kitten. Great! All is working again....sort of. I still needed software off that other drive. I haven't been able to mount it all day. I've got DiskWarrior going on it now but I'm not optimistic. I've started reinstalling all the libraries and soundbanks from discs onto the new drive and for the most part, I'm back up and running. I started with the software I've been using on the BARNETT SHALE DOC so I could keep working.

During the past few hours I've been working on a new cue so all has been well.

It's amazing how just when you think you're pretty stressed out something can happen to make you think otherwise. I'm usually a very good handler of stress. You'll rarely see me stressed out. Sabotage my computer the week before a deadline and you'll see me turn white as a sheet sweating buckets while I clutch my stomach to keep from throwing up.

Yup, that's all it takes.

Today I played Harry the first four cues I've written for the BARNETT SHALE DOC score. This is without a doubt, the most nerve-wracking moment for any composer. You want badly to know that you're going in the right direction. You don't even need a glowingly positive reaction just a nod that it's going where it should be. If not, it's back to the drawing board and that's always a compromising position to be in.

I'm happy to report that I won't necessarily be heading back to any drawing boards. Ok, maybe just one. Of the four cues I played, three of them were received very well. The opening cue (BSD-M01) had some issues. It's an open-harmony/quasi-minor piece that Harry really felt should be more major. He liked it a lot but needed a slightly different tone for the opening. What we decided to do is have me compose the rest of the score first and then save the first (BSD-M01) and the last piece (BSD-M15) for the end. That way I can incorporate themes and material from the rest of the score.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

The rest is there. I'm off to the races. I'm not up to full speed yet, but I'm getting there. I tackled another piece today and started to clean up some of the tweaks and edits we discussed this morning. All in all, it was another successful review. I've only got a little more than a week to write another twenty-five or so minutes of music. That's about three minute a day which is hefty but doable. I got a little behind today but I'll catch up. It'll go much quicker once the zones are in place. The beginning is always the slowest.

It's hard to imagine that a week from now I should be nearly done. And yet...I will be.

I just found out tonight that COWBOY SMOKE will be screening at the Action On Film International Film Festival in Pasadena, California, on July 30th (my birthday!) at 1PM. This marks the first festival acceptance for the narrative feature which I scored last December. Here's some excerpts from an email that Will Moore, the director of the film, received regarding the acceptance.

And be sure to check out selected cues from my score from the film on the right hand side of this blog. The COWBOY SMOKE selections are at the top of the list.

CONGRATULATIONS! Your film, COWBOY SMOKE, has been accepted as an Official Selection of the 2008 AOF International Film Festival. We are delighted to partner with you on showcasing your project and acknowledging your hard work and dedication. We have organized an incredible event featuring films and videos from around the world including Canada, Australia, England, Africa, Thailand, Germany, Sweden, Japan, China, Russia, Italy, Spain, and of course, all over the U.S.

Your film will be playing at the beautiful Laemmle Theater, located at One Colorado Blvd Pasadena, CA July 30, 2008 during the 1 pm Block. (A Block is a two to three hour window in which your project will be showcased with other accepted films.)

Your film has received award nominations and categories will be announced by or before July 7, 2008 on the AOF Website

FILM SCREENINGS
Pasadena Screenings: Laemmle’s One Colorado Theatre in Old Town Pasadena (42 Miller Alley Pasadena, CA). Laemmle Theaters is the premiere art house chain in Los Angeles. A family owned business, Laemmle Theatres spans three generations dedicated to bringing quality foreign and independent films to the Los Angeles community. Filmmakers are invited to speak about their films at their screenings. We will also place your provided post card and promotional one sheets into our special filmmaker gift bags and with our promotional volunteers.

TICKETS
Advance ticket sales can be made by calling AOF directly at 626.355.6929 or you can order them online at www.aoffest.com/store/Tickets-c2.htm. For a single program pass, tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door. There are also many other ticket packages available on our website. Please encourage interested parties to buy tickets in advance as this ensures more commitment to attending your screening. Please note, seating is very limited and even with free passes seating is done on a first come first serve basis.