Museworld

The Forgiving Sea is a seven-minute post-graduate film. It is directed by Christopher Allen, and was produced at the Seattle Film Institute.

I was assigned this film through the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring Program, taught by Hummie Mann. In that course, film scoring students are assigned films to score, and work on them as part of a team. The entire team develops the thematic material together, and then each team member uses that thematic material to write three to four minutes worth of orchestral music.

Upon completion of the course, the music is performed and recorded by a full orchestra.

I was one of only two people to work on this film, and I composed three cues. The tracks in my portfolio include two versions of these cues. The first version is of orchestral renderings of the three cues, made using Garritan Personal Orchestra. The second version, made after some minor musical revisions, is of the actual orchestra performing the work. The orchestra is a volunteer orchestra so there are some bobbles, but overall it was quite a thrill to experience a full orchestra playing the music.

The story is about the wife of a sailor. He returns from sea and they spend some quality time together, and he gives her gifts. Later one she discovers that he actually died at sea and never returned, but she still has the gifts she gave him. It's a sweet romantic film with a touch of "Sixth Sense" to it.

Here are the three cues:

1M2: The sailor's young wife is at home, reading the newspaper. We pan around the living room, witnessing various sea paraphernalia. The sailor arrives home. The wife is happy to see him and leaps into his arms for a hug. Then he takes her to the bedroom, where we fade out.

1M3: The couple plays some chess, and he resigns. He presents her with a small figurine, which she accepts with a smile. She places it into a cabinet, where it is revealed it is missing its heart; some foreshadowing.

1M5: The wife wakes up next to the sleeping sailor. She goes out to the living room to read the paper, and finds an article mentioning her husband was killed at sea. She goes back to the bedroom and finds it empty. The next scene: she is out on the dock, contemplating. She still has the heart of the figurine that her husband's ghost gave her while they were together the previous day. This is the end of the film, except for the closing credits.

The cues you don't hear are the opening scene (contemplating by the sea), a long middle section with lots of foreshadowing, and the closing credits. My partner wrote those.

If you're interested in more "behind the scenes" information, feel free to check out this article, a long description of the class and how the music for the film was composed and revised.

Afterhell is a very dark radio drama. It's designed to be an anthology about a post-apocalyptic reality, thanks to a rampant virus that infects people and turns them into serial killers. The first episode is available now, and the second episode is in post-production.

I wrote the theme music and incidental music for the production, using sounds from the Roland JV-1010. My portfolio features the intro music and the closing credits music, but there's plenty of other incidental music in the first episode.

This is a bit sentimental, but the Dream Of An Old Man piece is actually from a dream I had about my grandfather. The music loop was very prevalent in my head when I woke up, so I hurried to my studio to get it down before I forgot it. Forgetting dreamt music is one of the more upsetting things a musician can go through!

I transcribed it in a hurry - I suppose it could eventually become part of a song, but in the meantime I have released this bit of music under the Creative Commons license. Anyone is welcome to download it and make it part of their own song, as long as attribution is given and it is for noncommercial purposes. In addition, I'd love to hear about it if anyone does anything with it.

Here is an mp3 of the music, and here is the Garage Band Archive of the source material. Have fun!

The Detective Pogue Theme Music piece is a silly little jazz piece written a few years ago using sounds from the Roland Sound Canvas library. This is the theme music for an undeveloped radio drama about "Detective Pogue", a klutzy detective with serious psychological issues, probably brought on the fact that he has a garden gnome for a partner. The source material is an unpublished novel, and the tone is similar to anything Douglas Adams has ever written. The music is designed to be an intro to the radio presentation, complete with fade-out.