Short Genre-Bending Silent Film Score

[didger]

Here's a short that just picked up the Best Score & Best Actor awards at our local 48 Hour Film Project competition. It was great fun for me, as my amazing team picked silent film as our genre, and decided to start with authenticity then add modern twists. So I did the same with the score. I've of course been aware of silent film music but not a serious student of it, so spent the first day of the 48 hours researching, setting up a template and playing with ideas based on the script, then the second day scoring to picture. I'm really happy with it, and wouldn't do too much differently if I had more time. Probably work on realism of the solo violin most of all.

Most of the instrumentation is VSL. The "authentic" elements use the SE Bosendorfer and solo violin, cello and clarinet from their respective libraries, plus a bit of percussion, and are processed through the old Grungelizer plug-in, eq and multiband compression. I did my best in the short time to use great sounding samples then make them sound like crap. :) The modern music elements with clean production add full orchestral strings (I think I just used SE+ versions in the interest of time) and a few sounds from EWQL including the obvious cliche violin cluster glissando and the organ bookends.

Anyway, enjoy!

[cug]

@didger said:

Here's a short that just picked up the Best Score & Best Actor awards at our local 48 Hour Film Project competition.

Congratulations on your award. I've score quite a few 48 Hour films including DC, Baltimore, Miami and the International shootout. 

How much time did they give you with the locked picture?  My team is usually editing until the last minute.

[didger]

Thanks for checking it out and of course for the compliments!

I had a fantastic team. The script was written within a few hours, they shot from midnight to 9AM, edited all day, and I picked up a drive with the edit at 10pm Saturday. I pulled an all-nighter, slept a bit early morning, then got back to it and did the final exports for the team. Since we drew "silent film,"  the music was of course extremely important, so I was very lucky to actually score to picture with all the time I needed. This was my third 48HFP. The first experience was horrible. I scored to script, then the team didn't finish the edit in time to put my music in. Second time I had 4 hours or so, which was great. This last one was a dream.

I hope to do more. Some "professionals" frown on the 48 hour film project as just for amateurs (and most of the films are indeed terrible) but if you have a good team, it's a good, fun challenge, and an excuse to spend a crazy weekend doing what you love.