Spotting Sessions

The shiny object that is currently occupying my brief attention span is a film score. Actually, I’ve had this specific idea for a long time, but it wasn’t until Tuesday night that I actually sat down and started it.

The idea is to re-score an existing movie. Mainly, I think it’s a worthwhile and important exercise. And by “exercise,” I mean… it’s a lot of work. I’m talking feature-length film score here. A lot of work.

But that’s what I want to do, right?

The movie I decided to score is Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God, and I’ll tell you why.

For starters, it’s the genre that musically inspires me the most: fantasy adventure. And in that genre, there are many atrociously bad, bad, bad movies… and this one is surprisingly not as painful. In fact, I’d give it a solid B. I rented it one time when I visited Kirksville. My old roommate and his wife and brother watched this movie, and it was bad. But surprisingly palatable. Like the movie was trying really, really hard to be something better.

Lest I go off on a lengthy, tangental movie review, I’ll just say that obviously the movie didn’t churn my stomach enough that I didn’t want to see it a second time. I ended up picking it up off Amazon for less than a dollar, and now I own it and have been picking it apart in my spotting sessions.

Back to what I was saying. Reasons I chose this film over others.

So this movie is what it is. And I found that it presented a lot of opportunities for scoring. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more specific “sound” I imagined for it.

Another major appeal to composing an “alternate score” to this movie is that there is very little to get in my way. You see, of pros and cons, the biggest con of doing this project is that I can’t replace the score on the DVD without simply muting all sound. As I said, much of the movie has no music at all, other than subdued ambience. This amounts to more missed opportunities on David Julyan's part than I can enumerate—which means I can actually have my music heard with the dialogue and sound effects.

That's right, I said David Julyan. They got David Julyan to do the music. Saying that he “phoned it in” would be generous.

Now, a word about David Julyan. I do like his work. Memento will always, always have a special place in my heart. And the score to The Descent was immensely effective. Same goes for The Prestige. But this… this is the musical equivalent to mis-casting a part. David Julyan was the opposite of a good choice. Either he truly doesn’t know how to write for an adventure film, or something else was afoot. I suspect the latter. I suspect that the producers simply wanted a big name attached to this movie. They somehow bagged David Julyan and ran with it. He probably didn’t even get a complete cut of the full movie. He probably just wrote out his ass and let them apply the music as needed.

It’s a bad movie with a bad score. The movie I can excuse, to a point. But you can save face by having a balls-out adventure score (see Krull).

So partly, the reason I chose this movie is because David Julyan’s music left it as all but a blank slate. There was only one moment that stood out to me, during the climactic battle, a four-bar statement of the theme (that wasn’t even really a theme until late in the movie) that quickly wore out its welcome long before the end credits rolled. The characters riding on horseback, some decent camerawork was put against an actual adventurous cue of music, and I thought, “Hey, this movie is picking up. I expected a C movie and got a B. Nice.” The rest of the movie felt like a made-for-BBC-television historical reenactment.

It should be noted that Wrath of the Dragon God is actually a sequel, but the original Dungeons and Dragons is unbearably cheesy. Even Jeremy Irons could not save that movie. If you are even remotely curious about watching these, just skip the first one and watch WotDG. It takes place a hundred years later, so it is a direct sequel but it doesn’t feel like it. Astonishingly enough, a bad movie spawned a sequel that was better, rather than much worse, than the first.

So far in the process of doing my spotting sessions, I have made an interesting discovery. If I may toot my own horn for a moment, I must say that I have found that I have a very good sense of subtlety when it comes to pacing and visual/aural narrative. What I mean by that is, there were many “missed marks” in this movie that I caught, either as a film buff or as a composer. Many scenes, whether whole sequences or simple transitional shots, were not allowed to breathe. The most obvious (and repeated) instance of this would be when a character is going from Point A to Point B without dialogue. The scene cuts too soon, almost as thought the screenwriter was a visionary director but the director was just translating literally what was written down. What could have been a perfect opportunity for the score to communicate something great was lost, and reduced to a musically-devoid moment of only a few short seconds of a character finding her inner strength as she turns to face her task. Too many moments in this movie were rushed and emotionally flat. I caught them because I have a good sense for these things. Unfortunately, I can’t possibly accomplish that with the score because it’s the filmmaker’s fault for cutting them off with an overused cross-fade that looks like a Windows Media Player screensaver effect. Every single transition was woefully unprofessional, and I fear it has clipped my wings before I have even begun. It’s one thing for an action sequence to be reduced to merely a minute long due to budget, but every single transitional shot in this movie was a total failure. And re-using the same two exterior shots over and over again didn’t help, either.

I digress, again.

So maybe, ultimately, the goal is to re-print the movie somehow onto DVD-R, inserting my music, dialing back the volume where Julyan’s “score” kicks in and would sound against my own. That would take someone with Final Cut Pro to be very generous with his time… Otherwise, I’d just include cue timings on all my tracks and let someone who might be interested enough synch it up with the movie themselves, should they happen to rent the movie and have my score on hand. Or I’d do it for them in person. Mainly, the idea is to put it on a website portfolio to sell myself to prospective directors. That’s the whole idea.

And to write fun music, of course. “Write the kind of music you love to hear,” probably the best advice I ever heard in school. That’s the best and maybe only way to really advance your portfolio, your career.

As it stands, all I’ve done so far is analyze the movie, writing down exact times of hundreds of “moments” that could potentially influence the structure of the music. Granted, that took about ten hours, but still. It’s not the most creative part of the process. Also, I have been steadily listening to scores that will end up being temp-tracked in, because I think in this case it might be a good idea to go that conventional route: work with temp tracks, because everyone has to. The question is, can I walk the line between making my own voice heard and emulating someone else’s?

The sound I’m envisioning may take influences from many scores, but it can aptly be encapsulated by two film scores:

Robin Hood (Marc Streitenfeld)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Nicholas Hooper)

I suppose Patrick Doyle’s The Last Legion would be infinitely more suited to match the visual tone of the movie, but somehow this is what I have in mind instead. It’s not that I’m attempting to rip them off, but those two scores are my vague starting point. I’m sure that my final product, if I ever make it that far, would be something entirely different.

In a review of a friend’s score, Herr Vogler said the following:

”We may recognize where they are coming from but for the most part I rarely felt like they were trying to consciously imitate other composers’ sounds or styles…”

I hope the same can ultimately be said about my music. Am I consciously trying to imitate my model scores? I guess I am, but how much of that is coincidence, since it jives with my style anyway? And how much of that is a bad thing? These are deep questions that only composers can answer.

I think my attention span for this project has expired. Maybe I’ll score the silent film Nosferatu instead.

No, seriously. I think I might.