My name is Michael and welcome to my portfolio website and blog. Here I document my adventures in cinematic music creation and more.
Hope you have a nice stay!
I was lucky enough to snap up some tickets to "Interstellar Live" at the Royal Albert Hall in which Hans Zimmer, Chris Nolan, Michael Caine and even Stephen Hawking were present! I got in early for the pre concert talks which commenced around 90 minutes before the show began…
How much should you give away? How much do you expose yourself? Should you open yourself up for criticism? Should you hide your art away?
Music, and any art come to think of it, is an incredibly personal thing. There is a reason people won’t show you that paining they have been working on for the past two months, why that poem just never seems finished, and why film composers can be late on their deadlines ;).
It’s all about exposure! It’s fairly human to talk your way around things, get yourself out of sticky situations, and let’s be fair, talk utter bullshit at times; but when you play a piece of music to someone, or unveil you latest painting, suddenly you are naked, open to criticism and in many cases, at your most vulnerable as both an artist and as a person.
I’ve listened to loads of music from various fellow composers and what I find interesting (although never comment), is just how much that specific piece, written at that specific time is actually saying about the person, it’s very personal…
As a youngster, I would spend hours and hours playing video games, it was pretty much my entire life during the week as I would always watch movies with my father on the weekends…
Who remembers the opening raining blood scene from the 1998 movie Blade? I certainly do as Blade was an important movie for me as a then youngster at a time when the the big screen was just starting to fascinate me. Until yesterday, I had been totally unaware that the music from that scene was composed by Junkie XL and licensed for the scene; cue his initial interest in becoming a film composer.
Seasoned electronic music producer-turned-film composer Tom Holkenborg aka Junkie XL is being discussed more and more now in the film music world, what with his recent and ongoing collaborations with Hans Zimmer at Remote Control Productions for movies such as Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and of course his amazing solo work on Divergent and 300: Rise of an Empire, but it occurred to me that I had never really taken the time to look into his work.
Yesterday while doing my usual scout, I stumbled across a Collider interview with Tom (below) and found myself immersed in hearing about his start as both an electronic music producer and his transformation into a film composer. I found it humbling to hear that for him, at the time of entering the film score production circuit, his tracks were at number one in several countries and despite this, he took up work as an assistant for the likes of Harry Gregson-Williams to gain a better insigne of just how scores are produced in Hollywood, an amazing level of dedication and respect for an industry he clearly admires…
I had heard Zimmer comment in an interview around the time of Chris Nolan’s Inception in 2010 that he had been contemplating taking some time off from movie scoring to take his music around the world with a bunch of his friends and an orchestra.
I had been intrigued by this but after another seeing one move after another being added to his IMDb page, including another Pirates of the Caribbean, Sherlock 2, The Dark Knight Rises, Man of Steel, 12 Years A Slave and Rush to name a few, it seemed this was going to be unlikely.
This is not to say that I wanted to stop hearing Zimmer’s scores in new movies, far from it, I just wanted to see some of his scores performed live and knew I would be interested to study the stage placement and arrangement of the band, not to mention it would simply be an amazing event should it ever actually take place.
Then I noticed that with the exception of Interstellar (Nolan’s upcoming 2014 feature, and one I’m really looking forward to), his schedule looked fairly light in comparison to the previous years. This was followed by one boring weekday afternoon sitting at my day job bored out of my mind and daydreaming about film as usual, I received an email from one of the many live event websites of which I am partied and they happened to be advertising an event called Hans Zimmer Revealed. I instantly looked into it and excitedly bought the best and most expensive seats I could afford at the time, the gig was finally actually going to happen…
So I went down to the IMAX last week to check out Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. Like most films, before even getting into the movie theatre I suspected that I may spoilt the film for myself! I always spend far too much time reading about the post-production process and the production of the soundtrack that I usually know far too much about the film. I sometimes feel I should ban myself from the internet for a few weeks before a movie release but I digress.
“The 90-minute picture — unusually short in today’s world — is cited as having just 156 shots in total, with several that are six, eight and ten minutes long”
- Arri Media
What can I say? I thought Gravity was nothing short of awesome! Emmanuel Lubezki’s shots and his editorial team have in my opinion utilised every possible frame of the 70mm IMAX film stock to deliver some truly mesmerising visuals. From the very beginning we have an opening continual 17-minute shot where the camera maneuvers around the characters in space and none of the videos and interviews I had seen with Gravity’s re-recording mixer Skip Lievsay or composer Steven price could prepare me for what the film had in store sonically…
I ventured out to the Royal Albert Hall to watch a selection of live Danny Elfman’s cues for his work on the Tim Burton films and thought I’d share some pictures we managed to take on the night. A really great atmosphere and fantastic to see Mr. Elfman himself performing the role of ‘Jack’ from Nightmare Before Christmas.
It was during the interval of a Ligeti Qaurtet concert in Brighton earlier this year where I was amazed to watch a short introductory trailer for a movement known as the "Post War Orchestra" screening in the venue...
I have often thought about how we experience music and how this experience must differ from one person to another. Two people might be in the same concert hall, or even just sitting in a living room listening to music, but experience the sound in a totally different way. This could perhaps be down where the person is seated, maybe certain frequencies in the instrumental timbre are accentuated, or frequencies maybe in the bottom end (bass) of the sound example are dampened, therefore altering the persons experience or interpretation of the piece.
Either way, I believe that listening to music and indeed sound is a multi-sensual experience that is not only processed by our ears, but felt throughout our whole body which can influence how we feel about a certain sound or combination of sounds. I am sure many of us have been in a place where loud music is played and have felt the bass literally pumping through us, is this music? Or sound? It is perhaps besides the point, but it is a good example of how a sound is being felt rather than heard. In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums. Glennie lost nearly all of her hearing by age 12 but rather than that isolating her from music, it gave her a unique connection to sound.
One interesting topic I began to think about while listening to Evelyn speak, is the difference between experiencing music through performance, live at concert, through speakers projecting sound-waves into a room, headphones projecting sound into your ear and ear-buds which emit sound literally straight to your eardrum. This would suggest that the latter two options remove a significant amount of emotive qualities from music. Food-for-thought…
I may be posing this a little late as it went out on TED Talks over a year ago, but I really think it is something worth sharing. The Internet is such a powerful tool and can be used in a really creative way as composer Eric Whitacre shows in this video. It proves that music really is a global language!
TED Explains: “In a moving and madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world. He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube, and unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work, “Sleep,” with a video choir of 2,052.
The full piece premieres April 7 (yes, on YouTube!).” Watch the video here!
Legendary sound designer Richard King and the prolific Hans Zimmer feature once again on The Soundworks Collection, this time discussing the sonic experience of The Dark Knight Rises. I have heard mixed reviews about the film with people saying they preferred the second, personally I loved it and I can still remember the sonic combination is King and Zimmer thundering through the cinema. Watching this has just made me want to see the film again. For those of you who struggled with hearing Tom Hardy's Bane performance, I would recommend visiting an IMAX cinema as I think you will be surprised at the difference in clarity with regards to the dialogue in this film.
I should imagine there comes a point in every contemporary composers career where a larger MIDI master keyboard is required, for me that day came this week. I had been flirting with the idea of upgrading for some time, but what with the vast volume of products available on the market and just sheer size of a full format keyboard in general, I found myself trawling through the internet and never really coming to any sort of conclusion on what the best solution would be.
I had been using the M-Audio Oxygen 49 for the past two years and found the assignable faders and pots very useful, especially when working with sound design and electronic based composition. The synth action keys on the other hand and general lack of them were beginning to frustrate me.
Most modern orchestral sample libraries contain patches called ‘key-switches’, essentially this enables the composer to change the articulation of the loaded instrument during the performance at the touch of a piano note; These notes are usually placed outside the playable range of the instrument. In other words, should the composer be using a solo cello for example, using a key-switched patch would provide the ability to switch between a sustained and pizzicato note articulation at the touch of key instead of having to move to a different track with the pizzicato articulation loaded in order to play that part of the composition. This makes playing ‘live’ much more of a possibility and is a great way of adding realism to your sampled instruments. I found that using a 49 key MIDI controller made using these patches very difficult to use as I had to hit the octave button down on the keyboard every time I wanted to change articulation, a frustration which is no longer an issue with an 88 key controller…
