Artist Statement:
Over Winter break I found myself completely immersed in the works of Danny Elfman, starting with his band from the 80s, Oingo Boingo, and then moving to watching many of the movies he scored. These movies were some of my favorites when I was younger. The music from the movies have always captured me. As I started playing music, I gained an even greater appreciation for scores. Whether it be the hauntingly beautiful scores of Corpse Bride (2005), or the whimsicle world of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), I found that I couldn’t stop listening to them. This led me down a rabbit hole of the question “what is it like to write scores for films?” I watched interviews, stared at the $180 price tag on Elfman’s Masterclass, and ultimately decided to just try out composing by myself.
I hadn’t composed anything since my 6th grade music class, so I wasn’t going in with experience or knowledge. I downloaded Musescore and jumped right in. Musescore is a program where you can write sheet music and listen back to it using MIDI files for different instruments generated by the program. I worked for a few hours over break just composing a random piece, and I was pretty satisfied with it (considering my lack of experience and time spent on it). I really enjoyed the process, so I knew that I wanted to try composing something in music class where I would have more help and time.
For this project, I wanted to try choosing a film scene and composing over it so that my inspiration could come from somewhere more grounded. I decided to go with the opening scene from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012). It’s one of my favorite movies, and I know the score forwards and backwards, so I thought it would be interesting to see what I would compose on my own. There were a few aspects of the original score that I wanted to keep consistent with mine. I knew that I wanted to keep the orchestral tone, and I wanted the bulk of the instruments to come in when the character Suzy looks directly at the camera. With those ideas in mind, I wrote out a small shot breakdown and I watched the scene without sound over and over, writing down ideas that I had.
In the end, I didn’t use a lot of these initial ideas, but they really helped me start somewhere. Throughout the next week, I spent some time laying ideas down, but I ended up scrapping most of them. They just didn’t seem to fit the scene. In the last week of January, I ended coming up with a melody that I liked. I actually wrote the ending first, since that was where the main melody really came in. I added some instruments like guitar, violin, clarinet, flute, and oboe to get my main melody and background parts down. During the following week, I had a lack of ideas, and I didn’t enjoy anything I was writing. I watched some interviews with film composers to try and get some inspiration. There was a video by the Hollywood Reporter where Hans Zimmer, Terence Blanchard & Ludwig Göransson sat down and talked about each other’s work, and I found it really interesting and informative.
When I came in the next week, I was ready to get to work on the introduction. I spent some time choosing my instruments here. I wanted to make sure that the instruments and structure of the piece really related to the movie. The scene I was writing for only had a few characters — Suzy Bishop and her younger brothers. I wanted the intro to build up as more characters entered the rooms. The scene starts with one of the brothers sitting by himself. Because of this, I decided to start with a single xylophone to get a child-like tone. Next, I wanted to add a part to the intro that would represent Suzy as a character. For this, I really looked at the plot of the movie. In the most basic terms, the movie is about Suzy’s defiance of her family. Because of this, I decided to have an acoustic guitar play the same melody as the xylophone, but a few measures later, creating a round. I chose the guitar because I feel like the acoustic guitar still has a child-like sound, but more mature than a xylophone.
I spent some time syncing my score with the video so I could map out exactly how many measures I would have to fill, and where I wanted to add some notes/parts that matched up with the visuals.
After I mapped out all of the measures, I started filling the rest in, continuing the round and making slight variations to the intro melody that would eventually build up to the main melody. I added another xylophone playing along with the first one to match up with the part of the scene where all of the brothers are in a room together. In the movie, we never get much of a distinction between the brothers, so I thought it would be fitting for them to play the same part together. After I lined up the measures, it was easy for me to find out where I wanted to add small details. For example, I added a triangle when one of the brothers poked his head out of the door frame, and I could line up Suzy’s guitar melody.
The next weeks were spent adding instruments, taking instruments away, filling in parts, and re-writing parts that I didn’t feel fit too well. At this point, I also had my sister listen to the playback to get some fresh ears. She pointed out which instruments she thought fit, and which parts she thought I could add.
Once I had the structure of the score done, I moved on to playing around with dynamics and articulations. The dynamics took me a while to work out, partly because of my indecision, and partly because I was still learning how to use Musescore. After a lot of listening and tweaking, I finally finished the writing of the score. I exported the parts, and Nick put them into Logic to give the audio files a little more spice. Since I don’t have violins and oboes, I was using the MIDI files through Musescore to get a final product, so Nick played around with them a bit to give them some more life and depth. Once it was done, I lined up the video and audio, and I was done!
Credits:
Composed, edited and produced by Gwen