FRESH RELEASE: Ryan Shore's Rex Steele (and other short scores)
October 4th, 2009 (12:00 am)
Let's begin with what may be the most requested score from this album - Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher. This is an 10-minute animated short inspired by 1940 serials and propaganda material. At what stage of completion did you first see the picture and what were your first reactions?
I love this film. I first saw some animation sequences and stills from it about a 6 months or so before I scored it. My first reaction was being so inspired to be writing music for a film like this. I hadn't written a full action adventure score prior to this and I couldn't wait to explore it musically. I remember while I was working on it that I was dreaming at night about that kind of music and fully immersing myself in those action, heroic, orchestral sounds. To be able to write for the full orchestra, where anything is possible and where your imagination is the limit, is a very rewarding place to be musically.
The score takes itself seriously in the vein of Elmer Bernstein's "serious comedy" scores. How did you come up with the rich sound palette of the music?
Alex Woo, Bill Presing, Matt Peters and I talked a lot about the approach for the score, and they played me scores that they liked. They played music from other animations and live action films, and it painted a very clear and vivid picture of the sounds they wanted and the variety of orchestral writing they were looking for. We knew very early on that Rex Steele was to have a main theme. I composed two different themes as options for them, and they liked both of them, so we made one theme the main theme and then the second theme became the bridge, or the B section, for the main theme. I love Elmer Bernstein's music and his comedy scores are incredible. The juxtoposition of having the score play the "straight man" against comedy that is happening in the film can work so well. I don't think that had been happening much before Elmer began doing that regularly in the 1980's. I had a chance to talk with John Landis recently, and I asked him about that. He said that that kind of approach to scoring a comedy was something that he asked Elmer to do. It really was a revolutionary approach at the time. Prior to that there were great comedic scores done in jazz styles, like Henry Mancini and scores like that, so this was quite a departure from that. I grew up on those films of Elmer's, so to me it feels like a very natural way of approaching it. There are a few times in the score for Rex Steele where we play it a little closer to the comedy, like in one of the action sequences when Greta surprises Penny, and also when Rex comes through the screen during at the end of the film and the orchestra falls apart. It's fun to be able to explore the different approaches and seeing what feels best for any moment.
You use a 110 member orchestra for the music - how was this managable for a short film?
Alex, Bill and Matt had been creating the film for over three years. I get very inspired by animations -- this was my third animated short -- and we all were working to do our very best. When it came to recording the score, we knew that being able to record it live and with a full sized orchestra was the ideal way to go, but of course it can be expensive to do. But, where there is a will there is a way. It was a passion project for all of us, and we all wanted to find a way to do it right. We recorded the score in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic and I recorded the full score in one 4 hour recording session. That was one of the ways to keep the cost down -- to be very efficient in the session and to be very prepared for it. The recording session was run in the Czech language, and I had a translator with me at the podium. I prepared ahead of time to make sure that everything I wanted to convey about the score was written in the sheet music. All of the text directions and descriptive terms in the sheet music was written in italian, which is a universal musical language. This way there was very little that needed to be translated on the spot from english. I wore a lot of different hats throughout the music process as well to save cost. We came up with a very lean budget of hard costs, which was significantly less that it would have been had we not been as prepared -- and the filmmakers were able to find a way to finance it.
The choir is now almost a staple of big budget Hollywood action movies. What were your concept with the choral passages in Rex Steele?
I knew I wanted to have a grandiose, over-the-top sound for the arch nemesis character, Eval Schnitzler. An ominous, impending choir sound seemed to be a natural fit for it. I remember writing all the music for the choir before writing any lyrics for them. I later added lyrics to the music so that they could sing something more than just ooh's and ah's. If I remember clearly, they lyrics are something like "Rex Steele is our hero. He flies a plane. Eval is a bad man." and things like that. We had a lot of fun recording it. Also as a way to save costs, I also used female singers only for the choir. The orchestra was very large, and depending on the writing, often times the female singers are the only voices that are noticeably heard in this kind of an orchestra/choir context, so we didn't use any male singers as a way to save cost. The main concept in using them was if you were about to die or be killed, as Rex was in the film, these are the impending choir sounds you might be hearing at the time.
A Letter from the Western Front is one of your earliest credits from this collection. How do you remember back on this job and the early challanges of a beginning composer?
I remember being very humbled to be writing the score and extremely determined to do my very best. I had just finished my four year degree in film scoring from the Berklee College of Music. The only writing I had done to picture in school were for class projects. They were the same scenes that all of my classmates were scoring as well. So in a sense, at that time, everything was hypothetical -- you could write this, or you could write that -- and very academic. There was no feeling at that time that what you were writing was "the" score for that film or scene. I was so used to seeing what other people had done, and so used to studying scores of the established professionals, that it was much easier at that point to wonder what someone else might write for it, rather than what I might write. So, I remember feeling very humbled that whatever I was going to write was going to be the only score for this film. It gave me a feeling of real responsibility. I remember feeling that I had everything to prove. This was my very first film score, so I wanted to make sure I was going to delve deep and delivering something that I could be proud of for many years into the future. To this day, I still feel it is among the best I've written.
Once I had written the score, one of the practical challenges I had was how we were going to record it. Dan Kanemoto, the animator/director, was a student at NYU at the time, and he didn't have access to a large budget. I hired music students from Julliard and Manhattan School of Music to record it and we recorded it in a small studio in NYU's film school. The room wasn't large enough to hold the full orchestra, so we recorded each section of the orchestra in overdubs. I recorded the strings first, then the woodwinds, then the brass, then harp, then percussion. We didn't have the equipment for me or the other musicians to hear the previous musician's takes while recording new overdubs, so I just had to make sure that everyone was really in tune, and then I spent a lot of time myself mixing the score and essentially creating the balance of the orchestra completely in the mix. Almost like reverse engineering it. A number of years later I rerecorded the score with the Slovak Symphony Orchestra while I was in Bratislava recording the score for Headspace. The recording on this CD is this new recording.
If Rex Steele is the patriotic Americana, than this score is the counterpoint of pastoral Americana. How do you convince people to invest in an orchestra even for smaller ventures such as short films?
It's definitely a challenge for the filmmakers to find the funds, but the desire to do it is always there. Particularly on the animated films, such as A Letter from the Western Front, Shadowplay, Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher and Articles of War, each of the director/animators spent on average 3-4 years making the film. So when it came time to recording the score, the general thought is that they haven't cut any corners up until this point, so why start now? Then it was up to me to find an affordable way to record each score and present them with the budget. On every score that is heard on this CD, I took no money for myself. They were all completely labors of love. I took whatever money they had and put it completely into the recording of the score. Also, as mentioned above, I always wore a lot of hats myself to save costs. On almost all of them I did all the orchestrations, copywork, editing of the takes, and conducting myself. There were a few exceptions where I worked with some very talented people on those jobs, and they are all credited on the CD. When it came to the filmmaker actually paying for it, I think they mostly paid for the recordings through grants, investors, family, and sometimes from their own lines of credit. Every time, I assured them that every penny of their music budget was going right up onto the screen. It also helped after doing the first short like this, the other filmmakers could hear those scores, and so they knew there could be a way to do it.
A Letter from the Western Front won several awards, including a Student Academy Award and an Emmy. Did these awards had any affect on your career?
They definitely helped with the exposure for those films, which in turn generated more interest in my work. Other filmmakers saw those films and in turn asked me about writing the score for their film. I remember Dan Kanemoto saying to me that one of his fellow classmates asked him after watching his film, "what movie's score did you put into your film?", and Dan said "that's an original score made just for this movie!". Word of mouth and recommendations can often times be the best career builders. Scoring this film unequivocally led to the scoring of Cadaverous and Shadowplay, which then led to Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher and Articles of War. Of note, A Letter from the Western Front, Shadowplay and Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher all won Student Academy Awards and Student Emmy Awards for Best Animations. I feel so fortunate to have been a part of them.
Shadowplay is a Claymation film about the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. How did you research and find the native instruments used in the score?
I began by listening to many recordings of traditional Japanese instruments, which helped get those sounds in my mind when I was writing. I also found some great printed sheet music for the shakuhachi, koto, and traditional Japanese percussion, so that I could see how the music would be traditionally notated. Then after I composed the music, but before I recorded it, I had some conversations with the musicians who would play them on the recording sessions to let them know what I have written and see if they had any thoughts about how it best be performed. Once we were in the studio, I also encouraged them to bring their own performance nuances to the music. Often times the musicians who are performing the music can be the best sources of insightful information about how to most ideally play their parts since they have studied the performance of their instruments for so long.
Cadaverous is a dark comedy about a med student with necrophobia. How do you strike a balance between humour and terror in the music?
Finding that balance, to me, was the whole key to the score. I anchored the score in mostly minor and modal tonalities and then I offset that with some playfulness. The main motifs of the score contains a number of short staccato phrases that start and stop, and also kinetic passages with some liveliness. All of the above are in minor tonalities. All together it seemed to bridge the divide between the different emotions. We wanted the film to have an eeriness and a searching, unsettled feeling for the main character, with a rooted sense of the macabre, but also provide the audience a license to laugh at times as well.
The CD also contains several shorter pieces, such as "Little Mary Suite" and "Twas the Night". What pictures were these pieces written for?
The "Little Mary Suite" was made from a few of the pieces I wrote from a very funny short called "Little Mary" which was directed by Andrew van den Houten, and "'Twas the Night" was composed as an accompaniment to a fantastic recording of Louis Armstrong reading the poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas". "Twas the Night" was so much fun to write for since my background is in jazz music. Although the music I wrote wasn't jazz oriented at all, Louis Armstrong of course was one of the greatest jazz musicians to have ever lived, so it was very inspiring to compose music to his reading of the poem.
As we can see, your new album features music for all kinds of genres. How did you and producer Mikael Carlsson select the material for the CD and made sure it's still an entertaining listen?
I presented the idea to Mikael that I've always wanted to release all of these orchestrally composed short film scores in one collection. I put together a full collection of all the pieces from those films, and then Mikael did a fabulous job of coming up with an ordering for the album and choosing which pieces to include. Mikael has a fantastic feel for adapting music written for film, or in this case a collection of films, into a music-only listening experience.
You've recently completed the score to the horror spoof Stan Helsing. What kind of music should we expect?
This movie was a blast to write. It's from the executive producer of Scary Movie, so you can already get a sense of how much fun we had making the movie. I wrote the score for full orchestra with choir, and I also combined the orchestra with some atmospheric textures and in a few places some traditional 80's synths. The film's main character, Stan Helsing, finds himself having to battle with the most iconic horror villains of the past three decades -- Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Pinhead, Chucky, and Michael Myers. In addition to all of the underscoring for the film, I also was able to spoof some of the best known horror music of the past three decades as well. There was quite a bit of music in the film. I think I wrote over 50 or 60 pieces of music for it. We've had an absolute ball going to the San Diego Comic Con and the Toronto Comic Con this summer with the full cast, including Leslie Nielsen, to promote the film, and the movie will be coming out around Halloween through Anchor Bay.
Alex Woo, Bill Presing, Matt Peters and I talked a lot about the approach for the score, and they played me scores that they liked. They played music from other animations and live action films, and it painted a very clear and vivid picture of the sounds they wanted and the variety of orchestral writing they were looking for. We knew very early on that Rex Steele was to have a main theme. I composed two different themes as options for them, and they liked both of them, so we made one theme the main theme and then the second theme became the bridge, or the B section, for the main theme. I love Elmer Bernstein's music and his comedy scores are incredible. The juxtoposition of having the score play the "straight man" against comedy that is happening in the film can work so well. I don't think that had been happening much before Elmer began doing that regularly in the 1980's. I had a chance to talk with John Landis recently, and I asked him about that. He said that that kind of approach to scoring a comedy was something that he asked Elmer to do. It really was a revolutionary approach at the time. Prior to that there were great comedic scores done in jazz styles, like Henry Mancini and scores like that, so this was quite a departure from that. I grew up on those films of Elmer's, so to me it feels like a very natural way of approaching it. There are a few times in the score for Rex Steele where we play it a little closer to the comedy, like in one of the action sequences when Greta surprises Penny, and also when Rex comes through the screen during at the end of the film and the orchestra falls apart. It's fun to be able to explore the different approaches and seeing what feels best for any moment.
You use a 110 member orchestra for the music - how was this managable for a short film?
Alex, Bill and Matt had been creating the film for over three years. I get very inspired by animations -- this was my third animated short -- and we all were working to do our very best. When it came to recording the score, we knew that being able to record it live and with a full sized orchestra was the ideal way to go, but of course it can be expensive to do. But, where there is a will there is a way. It was a passion project for all of us, and we all wanted to find a way to do it right. We recorded the score in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic and I recorded the full score in one 4 hour recording session. That was one of the ways to keep the cost down -- to be very efficient in the session and to be very prepared for it. The recording session was run in the Czech language, and I had a translator with me at the podium. I prepared ahead of time to make sure that everything I wanted to convey about the score was written in the sheet music. All of the text directions and descriptive terms in the sheet music was written in italian, which is a universal musical language. This way there was very little that needed to be translated on the spot from english. I wore a lot of different hats throughout the music process as well to save cost. We came up with a very lean budget of hard costs, which was significantly less that it would have been had we not been as prepared -- and the filmmakers were able to find a way to finance it. The choir is now almost a staple of big budget Hollywood action movies. What were your concept with the choral passages in Rex Steele?
I knew I wanted to have a grandiose, over-the-top sound for the arch nemesis character, Eval Schnitzler. An ominous, impending choir sound seemed to be a natural fit for it. I remember writing all the music for the choir before writing any lyrics for them. I later added lyrics to the music so that they could sing something more than just ooh's and ah's. If I remember clearly, they lyrics are something like "Rex Steele is our hero. He flies a plane. Eval is a bad man." and things like that. We had a lot of fun recording it. Also as a way to save costs, I also used female singers only for the choir. The orchestra was very large, and depending on the writing, often times the female singers are the only voices that are noticeably heard in this kind of an orchestra/choir context, so we didn't use any male singers as a way to save cost. The main concept in using them was if you were about to die or be killed, as Rex was in the film, these are the impending choir sounds you might be hearing at the time.
A Letter from the Western Front is one of your earliest credits from this collection. How do you remember back on this job and the early challanges of a beginning composer?
I remember being very humbled to be writing the score and extremely determined to do my very best. I had just finished my four year degree in film scoring from the Berklee College of Music. The only writing I had done to picture in school were for class projects. They were the same scenes that all of my classmates were scoring as well. So in a sense, at that time, everything was hypothetical -- you could write this, or you could write that -- and very academic. There was no feeling at that time that what you were writing was "the" score for that film or scene. I was so used to seeing what other people had done, and so used to studying scores of the established professionals, that it was much easier at that point to wonder what someone else might write for it, rather than what I might write. So, I remember feeling very humbled that whatever I was going to write was going to be the only score for this film. It gave me a feeling of real responsibility. I remember feeling that I had everything to prove. This was my very first film score, so I wanted to make sure I was going to delve deep and delivering something that I could be proud of for many years into the future. To this day, I still feel it is among the best I've written.
Once I had written the score, one of the practical challenges I had was how we were going to record it. Dan Kanemoto, the animator/director, was a student at NYU at the time, and he didn't have access to a large budget. I hired music students from Julliard and Manhattan School of Music to record it and we recorded it in a small studio in NYU's film school. The room wasn't large enough to hold the full orchestra, so we recorded each section of the orchestra in overdubs. I recorded the strings first, then the woodwinds, then the brass, then harp, then percussion. We didn't have the equipment for me or the other musicians to hear the previous musician's takes while recording new overdubs, so I just had to make sure that everyone was really in tune, and then I spent a lot of time myself mixing the score and essentially creating the balance of the orchestra completely in the mix. Almost like reverse engineering it. A number of years later I rerecorded the score with the Slovak Symphony Orchestra while I was in Bratislava recording the score for Headspace. The recording on this CD is this new recording.
If Rex Steele is the patriotic Americana, than this score is the counterpoint of pastoral Americana. How do you convince people to invest in an orchestra even for smaller ventures such as short films?It's definitely a challenge for the filmmakers to find the funds, but the desire to do it is always there. Particularly on the animated films, such as A Letter from the Western Front, Shadowplay, Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher and Articles of War, each of the director/animators spent on average 3-4 years making the film. So when it came time to recording the score, the general thought is that they haven't cut any corners up until this point, so why start now? Then it was up to me to find an affordable way to record each score and present them with the budget. On every score that is heard on this CD, I took no money for myself. They were all completely labors of love. I took whatever money they had and put it completely into the recording of the score. Also, as mentioned above, I always wore a lot of hats myself to save costs. On almost all of them I did all the orchestrations, copywork, editing of the takes, and conducting myself. There were a few exceptions where I worked with some very talented people on those jobs, and they are all credited on the CD. When it came to the filmmaker actually paying for it, I think they mostly paid for the recordings through grants, investors, family, and sometimes from their own lines of credit. Every time, I assured them that every penny of their music budget was going right up onto the screen. It also helped after doing the first short like this, the other filmmakers could hear those scores, and so they knew there could be a way to do it.
A Letter from the Western Front won several awards, including a Student Academy Award and an Emmy. Did these awards had any affect on your career?
They definitely helped with the exposure for those films, which in turn generated more interest in my work. Other filmmakers saw those films and in turn asked me about writing the score for their film. I remember Dan Kanemoto saying to me that one of his fellow classmates asked him after watching his film, "what movie's score did you put into your film?", and Dan said "that's an original score made just for this movie!". Word of mouth and recommendations can often times be the best career builders. Scoring this film unequivocally led to the scoring of Cadaverous and Shadowplay, which then led to Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher and Articles of War. Of note, A Letter from the Western Front, Shadowplay and Rex Steele: Nazi Smasher all won Student Academy Awards and Student Emmy Awards for Best Animations. I feel so fortunate to have been a part of them.
Shadowplay is a Claymation film about the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. How did you research and find the native instruments used in the score?
I began by listening to many recordings of traditional Japanese instruments, which helped get those sounds in my mind when I was writing. I also found some great printed sheet music for the shakuhachi, koto, and traditional Japanese percussion, so that I could see how the music would be traditionally notated. Then after I composed the music, but before I recorded it, I had some conversations with the musicians who would play them on the recording sessions to let them know what I have written and see if they had any thoughts about how it best be performed. Once we were in the studio, I also encouraged them to bring their own performance nuances to the music. Often times the musicians who are performing the music can be the best sources of insightful information about how to most ideally play their parts since they have studied the performance of their instruments for so long.
Cadaverous is a dark comedy about a med student with necrophobia. How do you strike a balance between humour and terror in the music?
Finding that balance, to me, was the whole key to the score. I anchored the score in mostly minor and modal tonalities and then I offset that with some playfulness. The main motifs of the score contains a number of short staccato phrases that start and stop, and also kinetic passages with some liveliness. All of the above are in minor tonalities. All together it seemed to bridge the divide between the different emotions. We wanted the film to have an eeriness and a searching, unsettled feeling for the main character, with a rooted sense of the macabre, but also provide the audience a license to laugh at times as well.
The CD also contains several shorter pieces, such as "Little Mary Suite" and "Twas the Night". What pictures were these pieces written for?The "Little Mary Suite" was made from a few of the pieces I wrote from a very funny short called "Little Mary" which was directed by Andrew van den Houten, and "'Twas the Night" was composed as an accompaniment to a fantastic recording of Louis Armstrong reading the poem "Twas the Night Before Christmas". "Twas the Night" was so much fun to write for since my background is in jazz music. Although the music I wrote wasn't jazz oriented at all, Louis Armstrong of course was one of the greatest jazz musicians to have ever lived, so it was very inspiring to compose music to his reading of the poem.
As we can see, your new album features music for all kinds of genres. How did you and producer Mikael Carlsson select the material for the CD and made sure it's still an entertaining listen?
I presented the idea to Mikael that I've always wanted to release all of these orchestrally composed short film scores in one collection. I put together a full collection of all the pieces from those films, and then Mikael did a fabulous job of coming up with an ordering for the album and choosing which pieces to include. Mikael has a fantastic feel for adapting music written for film, or in this case a collection of films, into a music-only listening experience.
You've recently completed the score to the horror spoof Stan Helsing. What kind of music should we expect?
This movie was a blast to write. It's from the executive producer of Scary Movie, so you can already get a sense of how much fun we had making the movie. I wrote the score for full orchestra with choir, and I also combined the orchestra with some atmospheric textures and in a few places some traditional 80's synths. The film's main character, Stan Helsing, finds himself having to battle with the most iconic horror villains of the past three decades -- Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Pinhead, Chucky, and Michael Myers. In addition to all of the underscoring for the film, I also was able to spoof some of the best known horror music of the past three decades as well. There was quite a bit of music in the film. I think I wrote over 50 or 60 pieces of music for it. We've had an absolute ball going to the San Diego Comic Con and the Toronto Comic Con this summer with the full cast, including Leslie Nielsen, to promote the film, and the movie will be coming out around Halloween through Anchor Bay.
