Composer’s blog – “Hit me” Tuesday, 2 June 2009

As I mentioned when writing about Episode 2, animations tend to have a large amount of what we call ‘hit points’ in the film-scoring world. These are moments in the narrative where the music starts, stops or accentuates a significant moment onscreen. To work out these hit points I sometimes use a process called ‘beat mapping’ where, before writing the music, I’ll devise a basic tempo click track that runs throughout the entire animation. This allows me to see how easy it’s going to be for me to pick out certain events, whilst keeping the music at a steady tempo. In episode 4 I sometimes had to make the decision to either speed up/slow down the tempo to be able to ‘hit’ certain moments within the story.

For example, when they discover the next clue on Aileen’s laptop I wanted to mark this as a significant event but the faster/slower tempo needed to hit this moment just didn’t feel right for the overall pace of the cue. So in the end I decided to mark the moment halfway through the bar by bringing in the glockenspiel with a rising musical figure and having the cello change from pizzicato (plucked) to arco (bowed). Another example of a hit point in episode 4 would be after seeing the address on Kyle’s notepad, at the start where the screen fades to black. As we fade out of the scene, the music becomes more intense and the arrival of the black screen is accompanied by a strike on the bass drum. This adds a sense of importance to the information we’ve just seen, as well as acting as a sort of musical comma, showing the passage of time in the narrative.

Finally, I thought about having the beginning of what I call the ‘surveillance music’ (when Lyn and Kyle are outside Grazp headquarters listening in) starting at the first shot of them with the radio in the car. However, it felt more natural to have the cue start before this shot, as it helped the narrative flow into the scene better – which is important when so much is happening in such a short space of time! Fortunately this also meant I didn’t have to change the tempo of the cue this time, as everything conveniently fell into place!