Racking up the Laurels
Lost Treasure has been on the festival circuit for the past few months now and has been racking up awards in all categories — Best Short, Best Comedy, even….Best Score!! That was my first nomination and win of my career. Tears of joy were shed, excited fast-talking phone calls were made, really delicious carrot cake from Porto’s was eaten.
It seems that almost every festival we enter, we win some kind of an award. This is my third film that I’ve been on the festival circuit for now, and this has by far been the most involved! Going out to these screenings is hugely important and I wish I’d started doing that part of the job sooner. …
This is for the musicians out there who want to know some of the nuts & bolts of what I did and why I did it. This is going to get into the nitty gritty of the music theory, composition and touch on musicology.
First, some backstory. The director for this project, Rob Husted, requested some music for the Kickstarter campaign for LTOTV, but there was no finished picture to score to, only a script and a handful of rough storyboard drawings and photos of some locations.
Due to this being an adventure/comedy, with lots of nods to the 80’s and 90’s, I knew this was going to be a theme/Leitmotif heavy score. After listening to a bunch of reference material, mostly consisting of Back To The Future, Indiana Jones, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and Brian Tyler’s main theme for Thor (some of his best work, in my opinion!), while reading the script, I came up with what became the main theme of the film. …
A Karaoke dive-bar on the border of Burbank and Glendale. That was where I joined the search for the Lost Treasure Of The Valley.
What started as a conversation in that noisy dive became a Kickstarter campaign which became a film that is about to enter the festival circuit.
From the start, Rob Husted, the creator, writer and director of this madness, wanted the score to sound like Indiana Jones meets Ennio Morriconne meets Back To The Future, all with a modern, yet retro twist.
Urban-Magical-Realism Tongue-In-Cheek Comedy-Adventure, nodding to 80s Cult Favorites such as Repo Man, crossed with a badass Western Sergio Leone feel. …
As many of my readers probably already know, assuming most of you are composers, there’s two general career paths one can take when establishing themselves: the Assistant Route and the Self-Employed Route. The Assistant Route offers more stability in the beginning, but it can take longer to establish your own independent career. In some cases, some just work as assistants and never really go off on their own. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, but I knew that wasn’t what I wanted as I navigated my way through the Assistant Route.
Until fairly recently, I’ve been trekking away on the Assistant Route. It’s been a great situation for me. Nathan Lanier, the composer I’d been assisting, is a great boss and overall person. Before him, I had been through the ringer a few times, I did a stint with a big name at a big studio (coincidentally, he had, too) that ended up not panning out as I’d hoped it would, ran the freelance gauntlet for a bit all while struggling financially. Before him, I was considering throwing in the towel, as this just wasn’t working and my parents couldn’t support me forever. …
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