Friday, January 16, 2009

Thursday, January 15, 2009

He shoots, he scores..

The 'he' in question being the mighty Phil Sheldon, who has worked on the scores of all my movies since KillerKiller. This evening, I sat down with Phil and listened to his work thus far on Vice Day, (which, for those who haven't been paying attention, is my chapter of the forthcoming Bordello Death Tales).

It's a weird, dark art; the ability to accentuate, compliment and bring to life the images onscreen with sound palettes and music. Many times, I've gone on about how much I like scores that are a little counter-intuitive (the aforementioned KK score being my favourite example; instead of going for doom-laden bass, Phil opted for sparse acoustic guitar and completely changed the feel of the movie in a way that I absolutely loved). For Vice Day, Phil's opted for stabs of accentuation and some recurring motifs for the two main characters, along with the occasional wig-out for when onscreen action demands it. Watching the segment through with his rough work was a joy.. It brought a couple of moments that had felt a bit flat vividly back to life, and has filled me with a fire to raise my game on the final edit to wring every ounce of tension, sexiness and horror out of the final segment that I possibly can.

Music and sound is so vital. It's an area that I've been guilty of neglecting at times during shoots, leaving sound crew to work with twitchy equipment and insufficient set-up times, or simply hoping for the best under impossible conditions, (the KK shoot, with wildly varying dialogue volumes from different directions in an impossibly echoey environment, must have left our long-suffering sound man Magic weeping into his cans). Tonight was a vivid reminder as to how the audio is every bit as vital as the onscreen images, and I'm determined never to let the area go neglected again.

Can't wait to hear Phil's final version, and I'm itching to get back to the edit suite with a renewed enthusiasm for the project as a whole.

A great evening, all told.