billarnold.typepad.com

Ponderous

This is a piece I wrote a while ago for a movie I was working on. I just recently got my cousin, Sarah Arnold, to come over and record the violin part for me. What a big difference from the sampled violin. Thanks, Sarah!

Ponderous [1:10]

Favorite Xmas Movie

Here are my top 5 Christmas movies:

1. White Christmas
2. The Family Man
3. Elf
4. Die Hard I & II
5. A Christmas Story

What are your favorites?

Weekend Report

My weekend in L.A. was absolutely wonderful. The orchestration seminar was awesome and increased my desire to devote my time and energy to film composing. Here are some of my favorite moments:

1. Talking with my friend Matt about the Bible's infallibility and eating porkshops cooked in Coke. (Matt, you need a blog.)
2. Meeting with Lauralee Farrer, who is producing a film called The Fair Trade.
3. Being handed 370 pages of music written and orchestrated by some of the finest minds in the film scoring world. These two books have now been dubbed my Music Bible One and Two!
4. Going out to Cheesecake Factory with the A-Town crew. (A-Town is slang for Allelous, which is the name of the intentional community we lived in while in Pasadena.)
5. Learning that various composers give "lessons." I had imagined such a thing, but didn't know it actually existed until I went out to lunch with a bunch of classmates.
6. Meeting Mervyn Warren, an original member of Take 6, who were my primary musical heroes as a teenager. Mervyn was so gracious in talking to me about my life, goals, etc. I'm looking forward to following his career.

You may be hearing less from me in future weeks, people. I have come away from this weekend with an even deeper desire to study and practice the art of film scoring!

Orchestration Seminar

Tomorrow, I'm flying to L.A. for the weekend. I'll be meeting with a producer and attending a two day seminar called "The Art and Craft of Orchestration for Film and Television." The class will be taught by Steven Scott Smalley, who has worked on films such as Batman, Mission: Impossible, and The Insider.

For those of you who may not know, orchestration is the process of arranging a piece of music to be played by an orchestra. Many people don't realize that a composer might have a whole team of people working with them to complete the work it takes to write and record the music for a film. Often, a composer will write what's called a sketch for a particular scene. The sketch might include the melody for a theme and some other details about harmony, instrumentation, etc. The orchestrator's job is to flesh that out and make it sound great when the actual orchestra comes into record.

The course is going to focus on creating the "Hollywood sound," balancing the orchestra, using each orchestral family in dramatic ways, and working with computer technology. One of the things I'm most excited about is that we will be given 370+ pages of scores and sketches to analyze and learn from. When a film is completed, the studio is the one who owns the physical scores (and the copyright on the music). Unfortunately, they don't like to release scores to the public. That makes this a unique opportunity to learn!

I'm also going to have the pleasure of hangin' with my friends at A-Town in Pasadena, which will be nice. I'll give a full report on Monday.

New Cues

I thought I'd highlight some of the new cues I've been putting on my demo list. Most of these were written in connection with the project I'm currently working on. These were all done with samples (i.e. not live instruments).

1. Chasing [0:31]
2. Washington  [1:12]
3. Lurking  [0:25]
4. Spring  [1:46]

Akeelah and the Bee

Akeelah and the Bee had a great message and some good actors. I appreciated the heart of the movie, but it was unfortunately too cheesy at times. The movie contains a great quote, though. It apparently comes from a book called A Return To Love by Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

I'd be interested to read some reactions to the quote.

Streampad

I got a cool new widget! The "Streampad" in the right-hand column plays a bunch of my film cues. Just click on the one you want to hear. I found it while looking for something to use on my new "composing" blog, which is here. The new website has the same streampad, a link to my resumé, and a clip from Double Blind, the movie I worked on last Spring.

MySpace

I now have a MySpace page set up here. Let me know what you think. Also, does anyone know how I go about altering my home page?

More List Ideas

I enjoyed doing all of those film lists awhile back, but I've run out of ideas. Got any for me?

Update: Sorry if that wasn't clear enough. I'm looking for ideas for film lists.

Green Street Hooligans

Green Street Hooligans was my first introduction to a worldwide phenomenon known as football hooliganism. The movie tells the story of Matt Buckner, played by Elijah Wood. Matt is an American journalism student who is falsely accused of dealing drugs and gets kicked out of Harvard. He decides to visit his sister in England and is introduced to the "firm" called Green Street Elite. In the following dialogue, Pete helps Matt understand what firms are all about:

Matt: So, basically, firms are gangs.

Pete: Kind of. But we're a far cry from all that Bloods and Crips bull****. Shooting a machine-gun out of a moving car at an eight-year-old girl, that's just cowardly. See, we might be into fighting and all that, but it's really about reputation. Humiliating another mob in a row or doing something the other firms get to hear or talk about.

The following is from slightly earlier in the conversation:

Pete: Millwall and West Ham firms hate each other more than any other firms.

Matt: Sort of like the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Pete: More like the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The story shows us how Matt is drawn into this world of hooliganism and find acceptance that he presumably hasn't found elsewhere in life. He also finds that he is drawn to the violence.

Matt: Suddenly, I was part of the firm with the best rep in London...People around town had heard of me. They would hear my accent and say, "So you're the Yank." You know the best part? It isn't knowing that your friends have your back It's knowing that you have your friends' back.I'd never lived closer to danger. But I'd never felt safer. I'd never felt more confident. And people could spot it from a mile away. And as for this, the violence, I gotta be honest. It grew on me. Once you've taken a few punches and realise you're not made of glass, you don't feel alive unless you're pushing yourself as far as you can go.