Happy June, fellow travellers.  Here atop Temp Track Plaza in the American West the mercury has been steadily rising and once again makes me long for the days when I could afford that greatest of all sins: central air.  Alas, the life of a PhD student does not pay for such luxuries.  But one of the few pleasures I can afford is that of film, and we are now knee-deep into the Summer 2010 film season.  The next film I’m really excited about this summer doesn’t come out until July though, and you readers have probably already figured out what film I’m talking out.  Yes, it’s the seventh film from director Christopher Nolan: Inception.  If you have somehow managed to miss the trailers and such for the film, check them out here at the film’s website.

What I wish to discuss here is a bit about the films of Nolan and the music that accompanies them.  In the little over a decade of Nolan’s professional career, he has made 6 films using basically two composers (technically three, but since Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard worked on the same films, I’m counting them as one).  Wrapped up with this whole discussion is Nolan’s shift from composer David Julyan, with whom he worked with on 4 of his 6 films, to Hans Zimmer and Remote Control Productions (where James Newton Howard sometimes  works it appears) for the Batman films and the upcoming Inception (which lists only Zimmer on the credits).  I know many people in the film music community have varying and strong opinions about Zimmer and Remote Control, almost as divisive as opinions on James Horner, but rather than letting this sink to the level of modern political discourse, I would ask that we strive to keep a civil tone.

But before I tread into that minefield, lets first discuss Nolan and his films.  His filmography is as follows: Following (1998), Memento (2000), Insomnia (2002), Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), and the forthcoming Inception (2010).  Setting aside music for a moment, there is a remarkable consistency in quality and style among these films.  Beginning with Memento, Nolan has always worked with cinematographer Wally Pfister (nominated for an Oscar for each of the last three released films), and with the exception of Insomnia, Nolan himself has always had a hand in writing the scripts (many times along with brother Jonathan Nolan).  Further, all of his films were produced by his wife Emma Thomas.  What is also very evident watching the films is a very consistent visual style starting with Insomnia of long shots and aerial photography that began with his working with a large enough budget to afford such things.  Along with this is what I can best describe as a coldness, an emotional distance between camera and subject.  And it is into this distance the music falls.

David Julyan first teamed up with Nolan prior to Following for some of Nolan’s short films made during and after college in London.  His style is largely ambient type tracks using a mixture of electronics and strings (either synth or live), and sometimes other orchestral sounds.  In many ways, the early film scores remind me of Mike Post-esque Law and Order score – dark and moody.  But I would make a similar argument about Julyan that I do about Nolan, that everything took a leap forward with Insomnia.  For Nolan, he retained much of his trademark storytelling techniques – non-linear, puzzle like flashes or flashbacks that keep a viewer disoriented and guessing – but adding many more to the arsenal that come with a larger budget and studio backing.  Similar with Julyan, with more money at his disposal not only did his use of electronics and live instruments become greater, but his compositional technique flourished with said greater freedom. Whereas Following and Memento featured very sparse scoring (like I said earlier, akin to an episode of Law and Order), with Insomnia Julyan wrote longer cues that attempted to fill in the distance between camera and subject with the psychological tension that the film demanded of every sunlinght-drenched neo-noir shot.  The film’s tone is as dark as the music, but since the film is set in northern Alaska where during some seasons the sun never sets, the film itself is in perpetual daylight (a key device in both Nolan’s 2002 film and the 1997 Norwegian film on which it is based).  The juxtaposition of the two is part what makes the film unsettling to a viewer.

Skipping over Batman Begins for just a moment, let’s consider Julyan fourth and so far last collaboration with Nolan, The Prestige.  Many have found this a hard score to get at because it sort of recedes into the background of the film for much of the time.  It lacks any of the activity found at times in Insomnia and is very much the “musical wallpaper” that so many deride film music to be.  Listening to the score on its own illuminates that most of the time the score is long, held chords with movement occasionally happening.  Sparse, stark, and dark.  Just like Insomnia.  Part of this I do attribute to Julyan, but I also think that it is also, partially, what Nolan wants.  The music very much fits the aesthetic distance between camera and subject that I so noted earlier.  And if you had asked me a few years ago what I thought about this score, I might have said that it worked in the film, but when divorced from the visual, it doesn’t hold up.  This feeling is still true to some extent, but in the intervening years, I have developed a greater appreciation for this ambient type of scoring that at times blurs the line between music and sound design.

Take the cue “The Transported Man” for instance, which just popped up in my iTunes (YouTube version here).  The cue begins with what sounds like an orchestra tuning in, but the clusters soon coalesce then fade away into a slow-moving cue that has a low percussive throb mixed with sustained strings and other sounds mixed it.  It’s incredibly dense music that only sounds simple on the surface.  Yes, the music may disappear for a viewer of the film, just like a slight-of-hand magic trick, but could almost be more of a case of, to paraphrase The Usual Suspects, “the greatest trick [Julyan] ever pulled was convincing the world [his music doesn’t] exist.”  If there is a ill-word to be uttered here, it is that, at times, the scores for Insomnia and The Prestige sound too much alike.

So now let us turn to Nolan’s big-budget blockbusters, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (which will hopefully be followed in 2012 by Nolan’s third and final Batman film).  As mentioned above, these scores are done with Hans Zimmer and his Remote Control Productions (aka Team Zimmer, a phrase coined by a good friend of mine), and as mentioned elsewhere on this blog, are billed as a collaboration between Zimmer and sometimes Controlee James Newton Howard (from what I can find on the interwebs using the Google, the exact roster of composers at Remote Control is hard to pin down).  In many ways, it is obvious that the static, more ambient music of Julyan would not be a good fit for a summer action film such as that the Batman films would be, but at the same time, Zimmer/Howard composed a score that at times shares characteristics with Julyan previous work for Nolan.

Examine the opening cue on the Batman Begins score album, ‘Vespertilio.’  It begins with some ambient like effects that are meant to mimic the sound of a large bat flapping his wings and then moves into what we can identify as the Batman theme: the active string motor underneath with large brass chords sweeping up and down slowly.  If we were to take out the active motor, it would not be unlike something Julyan might write (we might also have the turn down the volume on the brass, but the principal remains).  Both Zimmer/Howard and Julyan’s scoring are athematic in a traditional sense, their scores are less melodically based and more harmonic, but if one listens closely and enough times, melodic themes to begin to emerge, such as Batman and the Joker, a love theme, etc.  This is all to say that despite the change in composers, there are aesthetic continuities between the films, and the differences can be ascribed to, rather than a change in composer, the differences between an intimate psychological neo-noir film like Memento or The Prestige and a summer action (albeit also psychological and noir-ish) film like the Batman films.  Throughout his films, Nolan has a certain type of music that he feels fits his visual language well.

Could Julyan have scored the Batman films effectively?  Maybe, but judging from his work on The Descent, I think that Zimmer/Howard were a much better fit for a more complex scoring project.  But what I’m arguing here remains, that Nolan has a certain sound for his films that he wants that fits with what he and Wally Pfister are creating on-screen.  Think of the opening sequence of The Dark Knight.  The long helicopter shots of Gotham City (really Chicago), shot in such a way to really be any city.  There is a certain feeling to these shots, that distance I’m talking about (accentuated here by the masks worn), and the music starts very soft, in many ways silent, and it takes almost 6 minutes to build up to the moment when the Joker takes off his mask and we have the descending chord that accents the gesture.  It is a great musico-visual moment and is a reason why I love using the scene in a class context.

This is all to say that while I feel that ‘auter’ theory in film studies is a tricky thing to deal with for students of film music (a future blog post), the continuity between certain elements of the scores for the films of Christopher Nolan show that he has a certain sound in mind for his films that was cultivated through his work with Julyan and has transferred into his current collaboration with Zimmer and Co.  There is also a close working relationships between Nolan and his composers, evident when you watch some bonus materials on the DVD discs in which Zimmer says, in the case of The Dark Knight, he gave Nolan a large sound file full of noise and sounds to help in Nolan deciding what kind of music and feeling he wanted for the Joker.  My wish is that all directors were as aurally aware.

I’m sorry that it’s been so long, but it was a tough semester.  I was taking a film studies class in which I wrote a 25 page paper on Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (I’ll hopefully condense it down into a blog post sometime soon) and also made a short film for an independent study in music tech and film scoring.  It’s the latter I wish to (not-so) briefly discuss today.

I am by no means a composer, never have considered myself one, and the few experiments in composing that I’ve done, while not out-and-out failures, did not encourage me to continue it.  My previous composition experience was mainly limited to assignments in various theory classes, counterpoint, and Introduction to Composition, which was one of the required classes for my BM degree.  This is all to say that I am not a composer.  But that being said, my original project idea for my film project was around a five-minute short, surely I could write between 2-5 minutes of music, right?

Well, the film turned into roughly a 17 minute short (closer to 19 with credits).

First, some background on the independent study.  Basically, I would meet once a week (twice a few times) with my advisor and we would go over the basics of some programs used in film scoring (i.e. – Logic, Pro Tools, Audacity, Reason, Garage Band, etc) and I would mess around with them, do some basic re-scoring to a selected clip (I mainly used parts of the battle sequence in Kurosawa’s Ran), and then I would meet again with my advisor and we would discuss what I did.  At the same time, I was also reading from some books and we would also discuss that.  Roughly half-way through the semester, once I had got the basics of most of these programs down – emphasis on basics – I started planning the project.  After two or so ideas that quickly spiraled into much longer and complex projects than I had time to do, I came up with a simple, easily film-able idea that also presented a variety situations to score.

Thus was born The Last Beer – a film with no real script, just loose scenarios for each scene and dialogue made up on set.

(I cannot upload video or music to this blog as I don’t want to pay the $60/year, though if you are friends with me on Facebook, you’ll find it uploaded in my videos section.)

The basic idea was to adapt the Rashomon technique of multiple, conflicting flashbacks of one central mystery.  In this case, the question of who snaked the last beer?  The film itself is in six scenes, each between 2-3 minutes long, of which three are webcam testimonials of the main characters detailing what they remember happening.  And in having these three sequences, I could try some different techniques and sounds, but the end result was slightly different in that I actually have a mostly unified score in terms of thematic material and instruments.

The actual filming only took about five hours, and then another couple of days to cut and edit the footage for a rough cut (of course, the editing process was spread out over a few weeks in reality).  After having the rough cut assembled, the first actual “scoring” was for a trailer I also edited together to an excerpt from David Arnold’s Stargate score, but for the actual score I had no illusions of duplicating his sound.  The first thing I did was pull out my bassoon and just sort of noodle around until I came up with a theme (in g minor) which I could mold my score around.  I thought about actually writing for bassoon which I could then record and integrate, but again, because of time and other limitations I decided to scrap such a plan.

From there I actually scored the film scene-by-scene, in order, using Logic Pro.  Most of the score is for piano and classical guitar, with some other guitars, bass (both electric and upright), jazz piano, and glockenspiel.  My instrument choices were mainly made using the criteria of what actually sounded good in the computer, which is why I only used strings and voice in the very last cue where I deemed it necessary for dramatic reasons.

When I actually sat down to being scoring, I felt overwhelmed quickly.  I played through the first scene a few times, playing along on piano until I hit upon the rather sparse opening of simple low piano fifths that lead into the very ending of the theme.  After searching through instrumental patches, I found that I liked the basic classical guitar sound and decided to use that for the first complete presentation of the main theme (though, there are two basic versions with slightly different rhythms used in the film), this then segues into a more raucous presentation as the main title cards come up, presented on what I call “James Bond guitar” but is called in Logic “Beatnik Guitar.”  I prefer my name.

While scoring that opening, I came up with the idea of the basic guitar loop that underpins the first full scene.  This is actually how I scored most of the film.  I would come up with a basic accompaniment that I could record once and then loop under a melody.  Sometimes the melody (usually related in some way to the main theme), would come first, but most times I would write the accompany figure first. The melody for the first scene I was quite happy with as I found it very insipid and annoying, which I thought would work well with the promise of an evening hanging out with friends.  I bring the minor mode back in, along with the main theme when one character remarks on the Rashomon poster, the plot source for the film. Following a full statement of the main theme, the insipid melody comes back in, but remains in the minor.

The three central testimonies were scored based partially on the actors themselves.  When I got to them, I had already developed a sound of sorts for the score and a few variations of the main theme.  For Bob, since the actor plays jazz bass, I decided to have a bass ostinato as the basic loop.  I then wrote a basic melodic figure that I could transpose easily up and down, much like the melodic figure from Scene II.  But as the scene moved on, I did some very basic improv and at times just used chords.  This actually led me to the way I scored Doug’s testimonial.  For some reason that I’m still not sure of, I decided to write a 3/4 base for this scene, a waltz-like accompaniment.  Over it, though, I decided to just improv in g minor.  The actor plays jazz sax and is a great improviser, unlike myself, but I felt it would be appropriate.  I recored and looped the waltz patter and then just began recording some improvs.  When I started to think I had “lost it,” I would go back to the last good point, delete what I didn’t like, and start from there.  It took about 3 or 4 times through to get a performance I liked.

For the third testimony, Steve’s, I had a tougher challenge.  During the course of filming and editing, it became somewhat clear that Steve was the heart of the film.  Originally meant to be comic relief, the actor playing him so nailed the role that he practically stole the film.  It was also around this time that I started getting ideas for a trio of films with the same characters, of which this would be part one.  And as I developed the idea in my mind, Steve became the lead character.  I knew then that the main theme I had written a few weeks prior was not just The Last Beer Theme but also Steve’s theme.  And because of this, I knew I had to try and compose a fully realized version of the theme for use during his testimony.

To accomplish this, the first thing I had to do was actually harmonize it.  When I first wrote the theme, it was just melody since I wrote it while playing bassoon.  A curious thing happened though, while the theme starts on tonic, the first down beat could not be a I chord, which made it awkward to bring in the melody since I had to plan the loop around an awkward pick up measure.  Once I had the harmonic structure done, I went about writing a counter-melody to fill in the temporal holes in the theme where there is just a held note.  From these three elements – theme, counter-melody, harmony – I then just began layering them.  Starting out very sparsely, then thickening the texture, and then thinning it back out, until only the piano, which starts the cue, remains.

The final scene was the last hurdle, then.  I first tried doing it using only loops provided in Logic, the idea being that I wanted some bigger orchestral sounds for this climatic scene, but after finishing it and viewing the film with all the music, I jettisoned the idea and started over.  I spotted the scene with three different moments for music, but I was determined to actually use strings this time, no matter how bad they sound (though I did actually use them in Steve’s cue, albeit quite softly and only for harmonic support).  For the first sequence, I decided to use a 6/8 arpeggio support figure with a mournful violin solo, to which the classical guitar is then added.  This is all to set a slightly ominous feeling leading up to the moment of discovery that there is no more beer.

That discovery is made by Meg, whose scene at the fridge is a mash-up of Peter Gunn and James Bond, or at least that was the original idea in my head.  I was messing around with bass sounds and stumbled upon one called ‘Liverpool Bass,’ which is fat sounding bass.  Playing around with figures I actually started playing the bass line from Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme and decided that was it…though not.  Instead of having a third as the first interval, I widened it to a fifth and went from there.  The guitar melody, played by my erstwhile James Bond guitar, is still derived from the ever-varying main theme, and most closely related to the violin melody heard in the previous cue.

The last cue of the film was very tricky, and is basically made up of two small sections.  The first section is a sort of conflation of Bob and Doug’s testimonial music, using a waltz rhythm basis with the bass and piano from Bob’s cue, and a melody played by glockenspiel that takes its cue from Doug’s music.  The second section is for string and chorus and is a final statement of the main theme that crescendos to a mighty g minor chord as the film fades to black.

The end credits features what I call “The Last Beer Blues” and stands apart from the rest of the score.  Originally I was going to pull a Bourne Identity and have Moby’s “Extreme Ways” but decided to go another direction just to keep clear of copyright law.  For this, I used a slow blues template in Garage Band, took out most of melodic instruments and had a friend improvise over it with an electric piano sound.  I wrote some lyrics for it, but again I didn’t have time to record vocals.  Maybe for the sequel.

I mixed the film as I composed it, and this was also quite tricky.  I was writing the score in the labs at school using Logic, but I was editing the film and doing the final mix on my PC at home using Corel Videostudio Pro X3, which only has 3 music tracks to play with.  I would export the individual tracks from Logic and take them home where I would dump them into Audacity and do a mix there.  I would then downmix that into a .wav file that I would import into Videostudio where I would do the more complex mix of making it fit with the film’s audiotrack.  I know, a rather convoluted process, but I had to work with the tech I had.

Anyway, it was a enjoyable process and as soon as I can afford to buy my own camera, and finish writing the script for Part II, I think I may just have a new hobby.  I harbor no illusions of actually becoming a filmmaker, but this, I think, can make for a fun way to keep my sanity as I work on my dissertation.  As long as it’s better than Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, I think I’ll be doing well.  That film is now my benchmark for awfulness in film.