Written by Darren FungSome 20 years ago, I responded to an ad looking for a composer for a Canadian Film Centre thesis short film. The director was Jeffrey St. Jules, and his film, The Sadness of Johnson Joe Jangles, was a 20-minute short detailing a young family’s struggle to adapt and persevere in the new frontier. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship, and Jeff and I have worked on every film he’s directed since, including his third and latest feature film, The Silent Planet. Having just premiered at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival, it had me thinking about what makes a successful composer-director relationship.The Silent Planet has a hybrid score—orchestral elements tied together with processed samples and a good dose of chaotic “let’s fuck this sound up” processing. We played around with pitch shifting and processing audio amidst a classical palette: recording live strings, a male vocalist, a boy soprano and myself on piano. One particular cue leads us into the mind of Theo, one of our main characters, and are brought into his delusional state of mind and his warped sense of reality by “fucking these sounds up.”As primarily an orchestral composer, a lot of the things that fall into “let’s fuck this sound up” category fall out of my normal wheelhouse. Jeff’s notes were consistently, “It needs to be more chaotic!” so I needed to reach deeper and deeper into a bag of tricks that I didn’t know I had to present a cacophony of...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Today