Days in the Life of a Film Composer

Marian Yeager (writer, director) recently released a very cool "old-school" poster for her short film, which I scored earlier this year, called "The Good Samaritan" painted by Jeff Nitzberg. I love it!

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For the past month, I've been diligently working on the edit of a short documentary film entitled "The Polish Hotel" directed by local filmmaker Margaret Barry. It has been a bear to assemble but I'm proud to announce that we finally have a fine cut. It still needs another round or two of tightening, trimming and polishing but it's an extremely good representation of what this film is going to be.

After we lock down the edit in early August we'll begin post-production which includes finishing up the end credits, sound design, sound mix and color correction. I'm not scoring this one as we've elected to use the music of a famous Polish jazz artist who is featured in the film. Her music is complementing the movie beautifully!

It's been a long road but we're both really excited to be so close to completion. It's going to be a wonderful little film that both Margaret and I will be extremely proud of. Hopefully, this time next month we'll be done and we can start to push it out onto the festival circuit in search of its audience.

We can't wait.

This past week at Comic-Con 2012, Kevin Smith (director of CLERKS, MALLRATS, CHASING AMY, etc.) introduced two new iPhone/iPad games to an unsuspecting crowd of fans. One of those games featured music I composed just a couple of weeks ago. JAY AND SILENT BOB: LET US DANCE! is a rhythm game not unlike Guitar Hero where you push colored buttons to the beat in order to keep Jay (Mewes) dancing. There are three songs with various tempos you can choose from to play the game. I composed two of the three songs. They're titled "Torque Wrench" and "Tomorrow Knows."

I was offered the gig a mere two weeks ago when Adrian Glover, a producer over at GameSalad (the team hired to create the game) here in Austin, called me up to see if I would be interested in scoring it. He produced THE CHILDREN'S WAR (2010) which I scored several years ago. It was a super-quick turnaround. I was given a week to produce the two tracks but I had some other things to finish up so I only spent about four days working on them. Matt mixed both tracks.

It was a fun project. I had never written music to an iPhone video game before. Plus I was able to really open up and create some fairly intense techno beats which I don't normally get to do in a film. "Torque Wrench" had a strange Depeche Mode/Prodigy influence with a screaming 80's metal hair-band guitar solo thrown in for good measure. "Tomorrow Knows" had its roots in 90s indie rock with some harder beats thrown in. I really enjoy both tracks.

Here is a video showing Jason Mewes demonstrating the game at Comic-Con.



And here is an article written by Billy Garretsen of GameSalad about the story behind the creation of the game.

This past weekend I picked up a rather curious new display piece for my studio. It's an early 70's IBM Executive MUSIC typewriter. It's one of the strangest things I've seen. It's modeled after a very traditional Executive typewriter only it is used for typesetting music manuscripts. Since acquiring it I've done a fairly exhaustive Google search and I can not find any mention of this device anywhere on the internet. It's like it doesn't even exist. The typewriter still works but the ink ribbon is dry so the type is pretty faint. Inside the hood I discovered a maintenance record which dates back to as early as 1971 and ends around 1976.

I'm asking around and still searching for clues as to what exactly this is and what it was used for. In the meantime, it's a really cool display piece for my studio and a conversation starter for sure. I love curious objects like this!!

Here's my newly acquired early 70's IBM Executive music typewriter.
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Here's a closeup of the keyboard.
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