fore we go into the studio with 60 players and every second counts. We don’t want to have any surprises when we go to the recording session. The doubleedged sword that comes with that is that Amin and I have to spend so much more time bringing everything we do past the level of demo. A demo doesn’t really exist anymore. Everything that we deliver is 85/90 per cent there. Susan: What is the common language from the rest of the film team that’s really helpful to you? Jeff: You speak to a composer the same way you’d speak to an actor. We want to talk in terms of the drama, and the filmmaking terms all apply. It’s our job to turn the filmmaking terms into musical terms.
said, to start without knowing anything about what your intentions were.
Panel 2: Emotional Connections: Directors & Composers Moderator: Susan Shipton, picture editor (Chloe, Being Julia) Panelists: Jeremy Podeswa, director (The Five Senses, Fugitive Pieces); Amin Bhatia, composer (Flashpoint, Power Play); Jeff Toyne, composer (Rogue, The Devil You Know) Susan Shipton: Amin, you were one of the composers on Flashpoint from the beginning, am I correct? Was the tone and look of the show talked about before it was shot? How did your work evolve? Amin Bhatiya: Ari Posner and I teamed up for Flashpoint. Ari has more of a songwriter kind of style to his music and I’m the orchestral side. We put a demo together for the show and we were told that we didn’t get the series. Then, a few weeks later, we got the call saying, “You’ve got four days to do the pilot.” Susan: How much did that ultimate score resemble your original demo? Amin: Between Episode One and the succeeding episodes, the style of the show really changed. Each episode is different. The police team goes through another crisis and they handle things very differently. So each episode had a different musical signature. There was a lot of co-ordination with our music editor, Joe Mancuso, the sound teams and the mixing team at Technicolor. All of us tried to keep in touch as much as possible on a per-episode basis and even sometimes on a per-scene basis. As composers, we usually get the work prints. We’re working with what we’ve got there and what inspires us to add to the scene versus overtake it. Where can we come in? Where can we stay the heck out of the way? We deal with lots of things: dramatic music in between dialogue scenes, music created for a scene, licensed music and songs the director or producers like that they want to have as part of the soundscape. Susan: Jeff, I’m curious about how technology has helped you in realizing your creative vision for a score. Jeff Toyne: It’s very expensive to record an orchestra. So the technology allows us to hear it and vet it be-
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Amin: You don’t have to know musical vocabulary. In fact we’d prefer to discuss the emotion of the scene, the goal of the scene. Jeff: One of the things that technology allows us to do is to point to something and say, “This works for this reason. This doesn’t work for this reason.” We can put up music on a scene and see how it plays. Sometimes in a spotting session we talk about whether we’d like to get temp music or not. It’s very difficult for people, even for composers and musicians, to talk about music. It’s so much easier to hear it. Susan: I’m always really curious about where the decision comes for the type of music, in a very broad sense. Is it orchestral? Is it period? Jeff: One of the things we strive for is to create a musical world for a film to live in that is unique. On a television show, they call it the kitchen music. You hear the music in the kitchen and you know your show is on. Susan: I saw all of Jeremy Podeswa’s feature films at various stages of edit. Jeremy, please talk about how the temp track evolved in the cutting room and about the difference in sound and music between the three films. Jeremy Podeswa: I worked with different composers on each of the three features. I tend to be very loyal with crew people, but with composers, it’s not a matter of loyalty, it’s more a matter of trying to cast people who are in line with what I’m trying to do with that movie. And the three composers I chose for the movies successfully captured the essence of what I was looking for. Temp tends to be a really important thing for me when communicating with the composer. The movies I made I’ve also written, and sometimes I’m listening to music as I’m writing and that music informs what I’m doing. With Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels, who wrote the novel, had recommended a Greek composer, Eleni Karaindrou, who had done all of Angelopoulos’s movies. She was going to do the movie but it didn’t work out. When it all fell apart, I thought, “Going with a Greek composer is still a really good idea for this movie.” I found Nikos Kypourgos, a composer who was not exactly like Eleni but I could see he would have a sympathy with that kind of approach, and his music was the whole temp track. I think that was really difficult for him, coming into the project. We had to find a way that Nikos could do something that was him and still be true to my original conception of
what the score should be. And in the end I think he did a great job and it is very much him. In TV I rarely work with the composer. TV movies, yes. Sometimes if I have a long association with a show I may meet the composer at a party and then we know each other and sometimes we may even communicate, but we’re never brought together. Producers seem to prefer not to bring people together, for some reason. But we do work a lot with cues from the show. So unless you’re doing the first or second show where there are no cues available, there’s a lot to work with. And the editors have everything available to them from every episode that’s been done. When we’re putting the director’s cut together, I’m concerned with making sure that the viewing experience is as close to the final as we can get. The sound design and music are complete in terms of what the emotion should be. Susan: You’re such a musical person, from the way you’ve worked on your features. You must miss that relationship in television with a composer. Jeremy: I do, a little bit, but I have to say that I work with so many good editors. They’re really sophisticated people and pull things that are really great for me to listen to. And sometimes, if it’s with licensed music, we have amazing post-production supervisors, music supervisors, who will find incredible things. My first experience doing a show in the States was Six Feet Under, and they had an amazing music supervisor. I would discover all kinds of great music through him and they had a pretty healthy budget so they could license almost anything. Susan: Could Amin and/or Jeff talk a little bit more about spotting sessions? Just how important are they? Jeff: People don’t realize how long it takes to spot a film. It’s not unreasonable to take eight hours to spot a feature-length film. But I’ve definitely heard, “Spotting session? We’ve done the spotting. We have no reason to talk about it.” Amin: In today’s day and age, maybe the spotting session doesn’t have to be eight hours anymore. But even if there’s a spotting session, which is the equivalent of a phone call, it’s our job to go, “Yeah, I see what you mean about that working really well. We’ll be able to create something like it or stay with that mood.” We both fight for as communication as early as possible. And not only with the filmmakers, the initial visualizers, but also the sound-design team and the dialogue team. We want to find out how we can use our bags of tricks to enhance the vision the director or the producer had at the very beginning. Jeff: We’ve all been led down the wrong path by temp music and a conversation up front can help us. Temp music is exactly that: It’s temporary. And sometimes the reason that a piece of music is in a scene is not because it works on an emotional level, or has the right musical quality or tone. Sometimes it has the right length, starts and ends at the right time, and has a nice build. Amin: Temp music is a necessary evil. There used to be a system by which once temp did its job, and everybody had a conversation as to, “Here’s why it’s working, here’s what we need,” then, for a few