Gazette Birds of Passage Feb 10

February 2010 OC Gazette Magazine a day in the life Birds of Passage

RECORDING THE SOUNDTRACK
AT CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY

{ INTERVIEW & PHOTOS BY SARA WILKINS }

CHECK OUT MORE PHOTOS FROM THE RECORDING SESSION

On January 4th and 5th, 2010, film students and fellow musicians came together on the Chapman University campus to create a live orchestral recording for the student directed/produced short film Birds of Passage, “the story of two childhood friends who share a dream to travel the world.” This project wasn’t found on any class syllabus. The 40-minute adventure film of their own undertaking took 10 months to complete. Despite the fact that most parties involved were only in their freshman year of college, the students collaborated like Hollywood veterans. I sat in on their final recording session, and spoke with Isaac Kramer (Conductor), Evan Roth (Composer), Tyler Hindsley (Recording Engineer), Joe Sill (Director), and Taylor Madden (Producer). This is A Day In The Life at a film score recording.

Sara Wilkins: How did you each get involved with the project?

Isaac Kramer: The film was directed by Chapman student Joe Sill. He went to Evan and asked him to compose a score. Evan wrote a full orchestral score, then called me to put together the orchestra, and bring in Tyler. Today we’re here recording.

SW: Is this a single score, or is it a full soundtrack?

Evan Roth: Oh, it’s for the whole film.

SW: How does the recording process work?

IK: Recording is a very sensitive process, because Tyler’s up there in the booth, and he can hear when somebody just does this [taps foot].

Tyler Hindsley: Even turning the page gets picked up in the mics. In this kind of process, there’s always a lot of postproduction, where I go back and fix the problems. In the digital age, there’s so many things you couldn’t fix 50 years ago that you can now.

SW: Was the film put together when you started?

ER: The story line was there, and the whole entire screenplay was written, but as far as the movie as a whole: there were only scenes. Typically when you do a movie, when you’re a composer starting to write, they give you the whole movie. We did it in scenes, because it’s hard to put a movie together [laughter]. It took us a good two or three months to get the entire film tied together.

SW: How much freedom did you have?

ER: Joe, the director, gave me the style of music he wanted for each scene.

IK: I would compare this to West Side Story. It's a totally different sound concept, but let me show you how—

ER: It’s pop-influenced.

IK: West Side Story is a piece of classical music with a very heavy jazz influence. This is a piece of classical music with a very heavy pop influence. So, I would not call it pop, I would just call it pop-influenced classical music.

TH: Most people call this “soundtrack music.” It’s the universal term in the iTunes world.

ER: Sometimes 50 Cent is on a soundtrack. I wouldn’t call that “orchestral” [laughter].

IK: Today we’re going to be recording the end of the film. We did the beginning yesterday. Today is much more challenging. The score is very difficult. It’s for a very broad orchestration and there’s no way to stop, because—

ER: It goes right through.

IK: So, I’m not going to make Tyler do all this terrible editing, because we’re going to get a good recording straight through it.

ER: It's six minutes of music.

IK: The recording process gets intense, because we’re right down to the wire. We have to get it. In the rehearsal, it’s much more relaxed; it’s about creating music. The recording is about perfection, or as close to perfection as possible.

ER: I have the hardest part today though, because I’m going to be playing piano. The composer never plays.

TH: Sometimes the composer conducts, but in this case, Evan thought it would be easier to have Isaac do it. We had to reorchestrate some things.

IK: We decided the tone color of the score with the film at the last minute. We originally had a harp, and we listened to it; it just didn’t match. This film is very sad. The piano was the dark color and the harp sounded too angelic. So we chose to pull the harp. Today, it has a much more ominous sound. The piano fits the screenplay better. Sometimes you have to make decisions like that. You just don’t know what it's going to sound like until you get here.

ER: That’s the nerve-racking part. We can’t even tell you how many complications there are.

IK: This project is really quite unique in that you don’t find a lot of people at our age who do this. Generally, what happens at our level is the composer produces the “mini soundtrack” [on the computer], and that’s it. This only happens in—

ER: Hollywood studios. We’re really lucky to put this together.

SW: So, Evan, how do you start writing?

ER: Well, I’m a pianist, so I compose on the keyboard. I could feel the emotions in the movie and write to that. The hardest part was getting it to sound good. Once all the parts are there, making the dynamics sound like everything’s tight-knit, like a real orchestra—that was the most difficult part.

TH: You have to visualize what it’s going to sound like. The synth track isn’t going to do it perfectly. You have to use your imagination and write down exactly what you want.

ER: I usually internalize the music in my head before I write anything out. I’ll hear the entire track in my head first. [Other] composers might go measure by measure.

SW: Did you go back and forth with the director?

ER: We've re-written scenes like 10 times.

TH: You have to find a balance. The director is the head honcho, so whatever he says, is rightv. He may ask for something that’s completely non-musical, but we have to find a happy medium somewhere and figure out how to translate words into musical terms.

IK: Another challenge we have along the process is achieving the sound that Evan had. He knows the sound he wants, and I’m not Evan. The reality is that it’s down to the wire. At the same time, you want it perfect. With the software that Evan used, you wouldn’t be able to tell that it was software—it sounds like the instruments.

ER: It sounds like a real orchestra.

IK: But the difference is, there’s no feeling in it.

TH: It sounds robotic.

IK: This is what brings the music to life.

Pictured from left to right: Christopher Nario (Recording Engineer), Taylor Madden (Producer), Joe Sill (Director), Isaac Kramer (Conductor), Tyler Hindsley (Recording Producer), and Evan Roth (Composer) at Chapman University.

Birds of Passage

WATCH THE OFFICIAL TRAILER BELOW

Composed by Evan Roth

(contact him: esroth@gmail.com)

Conducted by Isaac Kramer

(contact him: Isaac.Kramer@necmusic.edu)

LISTEN TO THE END TITLES SCORE

Directed by Joe Sill

Produced by Taylor Madden

BIRDS OF PASSAGE CREDITS

Starring Alex Gilman & Katie Kemp

Screenplay by Brandon Nguyen, Mike Normandia & Joe Sill

Directed by Joe Sill

Produced by Taylor Madden

Music composed by Evan Roth

Music Conducted by Isaac Kramer

The Orchestra:

Recording Producer

Tyler Hindsley

Recording Engineer

Chris Nario

Conductor

Isaac Kramer

Piano

Evan Roth - Principal

Violin

Valerie Geller - Concertmaster

Christina Rose Haugen- Assoc. Concertmaster

Richard Kenyon - Principal 2nd

Viola

Edna Hood - Principal

Cello

Warren Hagerty - Co-Principal

Elizabeth Moulton - Co-Principal

Bass

Andrew Chilcote - Principal

Electric Bass

Devon Taylor - Principal

Guitar

Eddie Campbell - Principal

Drum Set

Graham Spillman - Principal

Orchestral Percussion

Emily Backal - Principal

Felicia Vandever

Dylan Campbell

Flute

Caitlin Phillips - Principal

Cara Krieger

Clarinet

Eugene Lee - Principal

French Horn

Eric Orwoll - Principal

Chelsea Shioya - Assistant Principal

Tuba

Devon Taylor - Principal

“The story of two childhood friends who have grown apart as young adults - Ethan, who cares only to do with life as he wants, and Abigail, who is trapped by her desire for power and financial success. The film follows their childhood dream to travel the world, their inner troubles and the ultimatum that eventually brings them both together.”

Sara Wilkins: You said the film began as a music video project, and then evolved into a 40-min. film. How did the film transform? Were you inspired by something specific?

Joe Sill: Yeah the project started out as a music video that I thought would be nice for our group of friends in film to do as kind of a last hurrah for our senior year. I had been thinking about doing some small, last project for awhile during our last semester as seniors, but I had no idea what. I think I was sitting in front of my computer at home one morning and listening to this Coldplay song, which for some reason - kind of out of nowhere - evoked this image of a guy sailing across the world in a little dinghy boat. I then started thinking up some really rough guidelines to the story of a guy traveling around the world - probably was inspired by my own dreams to do the same. I get on Facebook and send my good friend Brandon Nguyen - who was basically my screenwriting partner on our projects for two, three years now - a short message saying, "I want to make a music video." And from thereon, after we began talking about where we could go with the character, and decided that a music video was gonna be too small for our ambitions. So we just kept writing, writing, and soon enough it just became a story with a scale that we had never pursued before. It was definitely a risk.

SW: Did you and Taylor (Birds Producer) work closely together to develop the script?

JS: Taylor was involved pretty much from the get-go of pre-producing the project. Brandon and I had already finished the script when I went to Taylor to discuss him producing the film. He was another one of our group of film buddies that we always worked with together, so he was stoked about working on a project - even though he had little idea of the scope of the film. He played a key part in making the project possible definitely my right hand man in this scheme.

SW: How long has the process been from start to finish?

JS: Brandon, Mike Normandia - another close friend in our group, and I started scripting mid-February and finished in early May. From there, Taylor and I took on working together a treatment portfolio to begin finding locations, actors and props and whatnot. We didn't have to worry about equipment or crew members because all our equipment comes from the company that taught our high school the professional filmmaking ethic - FilmEd* Academy of the Arts, www.filmedacademy.com - and the crew basically came from our own group. We began principal photography the very weekend of our high school graduation, and continued for two straight weeks. Over the course of the rest of the summer consisted mostly of organizing footage, rough sequencing, and occasional re-shoots to pick up scenes we thought we could and should improve on. School for all of us soon began, which was the home stretch of post-production where I met Evan Roth and, while I worked on the final edits, he composed and self-performed the entire soundtrack for the film. I finished the film December 19 at about 3 in the morning, and we premiered the film that same day at the Art Theatre in Long Beach, where we had about 200 guests show up. It was a culminating moment for our little film group, but I now see it as simply a beginning.

SW: Are you satisfied with the end result?

JS: I am very much a perfectionist, and there are ALWAYS things I can find myself lacking in - things I can always improve on. Although it's a seriously stressful work ethic, it definitely pushes me to question myself and not stand still and get comfortable in one spot. It's all about progression. That said, I'm extremely proud of the end product. There are things I personally can call out and say - that could have been done better. But this has been an accomplishment for our group of high-schoolers that have done what most college students don't get a chance to do, and I'm grateful for these opportunities I'm given every day. It was definitely a risk for a project, but it all came together - our group became a family of sorts, and I'd have to say that last February I would not have possibly even fathomed the project becoming what it is today.

SW: What do you have cooking up for the future?

JS: Oh man, the future. I have no idea! I’m currently taking a break from any huge individual projects - I’ve been working on a few smaller projects - the other week my good friend Royce Choi and I shot a music video in L.A. for rapper Roscoe Umali and the GGB group - but no passion projects at the moment. Birds was our '09 film, and I'm sure we'll be brewing up another project for '10, but for now I am happy to say I'm not worrying about it in the least.

SW: About the music... Can you appreciate the difference in using a live recording of the score, as opposed to the digital version?

JS: It was definitely an experience to walk into the recording session and hear an orchestra comprised of people I have never met before play the music we used in our film. I remember our conductor, Isaac Kramer, saying that a digital version can evoke perfection in a soundtrack, whereas a live recording can arouse human emotion. I think he was spot-on with that statement.

SW: What was it like working with Evan? Did he surprise you with what he wrote? Was it what you envisioned?

JS: Evan Roth definitely surprised me in every sense of the word. I had never before delved into the music department of filmmaking before - I'd just use snippets of actual motion picture soundtracks and trim them down to what I needed out of them. So it just made our project so much more authentic to make that part of the project our own as well. I met Evan in one of my classes at Chapman, and I had shown him the trailer to the film and asked him what he thought, and he asked, "do you have a composer?" He had also never worked on a film before, so it was a first for both of us. We would spend endless hours sitting down in the basement music lab at Chapman, just editing and mixing. I'd be editing the movie and he'd say, "listen to this, I think this idea could work for this scene". And we'd discuss elements of what I wanted musically out of each scene, and we'd run through rough drafts and what he could improve on and - if it wasn't right the first time, as it sometimes was - it would eventually get there, and it'd be great. The soundtrack was exactly how I had envisioned it to be - and more. Evan's very much a perfectionist as I am, and though perfectionists can be stubborn at times (myself included), it's very rewarding in the end.

Sara Wilkins: Did you work closely with Joe to develop the script? What was it like working together?

Taylor Madden: Joe and Brandon Nguyen were writing a script for a music video, when they asked me to produce it (and asked to borrow my laptop). This turned into a 20 page script, which I got bits and pieces of, and gave some of my ideas and advice about certain parts which for the most part they took. Then the script was finished and we all read the whole thing and talked about it together a lot. But the only scene that I really had a part in writing was the Irish Bar fight scene, which I added a lot of Irish philosophy into. Unfortunately, the person we cast as the Irish character canceled last minute, and I rediscovered that I'm a horrible actor, so that scene was cut.

As for working with Joe, it's always difficult and awesome working with Joe, because Joe is a lot more than a friend, but more like a brother. He never knocks when he comes over, and goes right to the refrigerator. We really are very different types of people, but through it all, we are very close friends. We really value each other's input, but aren't afraid to stand up to each other. When people see us, sometimes they notice a lot of arguing, but I think that just stems from the fact that he's family. All in all, it's always a positive experience working my Joe.

SW: Are you satisfied with the end result?

TM: I'm very satisfied with the end result. I actually took it to one of my professors, William Hall, at OCC. He used to be in the industry and is now teaching. Anyways, when I showed it to him, he said that this was probably in the top 5% of student films nationwide. This was a really amazing compliment because he was comparing us with films from seniors at schools like USC and UCLA and Chapman and other major film schools, and here we are, freshman in college and we've done something so amazing. Imagine what could be produced by our senior year.

SW: Which festivals are you hoping to submit the film to? When can someone purchase a copy?

TM: We're looking at about 11 film festivals, but we only have a limited budget, so we can't enter all of them, but one that we really want to get into is the Newport Beach film Festival. And we are keeping it in the states. Some of the film festivals don't allow you to sell your film until after their festival, most likely because they want to help sell it if it goes big, so we can't distribute until after we decide where it is going.

SW: What do you have cooking up for the future?

TM: We plan to start talking about a short film script in March or April and try to film during the summer again. We both are interested in exploring the action genre, but we'll have to see. Most importantly, we really learned a lot of what to do and what not to do during Birds Of Passage, and we plan on applying that knowledge to our next film.

SW: About the music... Can you appreciate the difference in using a live recording of the score, as opposed to the digital version

TM: Personally, Music isn't really my area of expertise. I enjoy the music I listen to, and enjoyed the music that was created by both Evan and Isaac. The way Joe and I work, he has almost all of the control of the artistic parts of the film, and the way he and Evan work together, Evan has a large say on how the music is played out. I really don't control the music, although my input is valued.

SW: What was it like working with Evan? Did he surprise you with what he wrote? Was it what you guys envisioned?

TM: Working with Evan was awesome. He put countless hours into this project, and his hard work and dedication paid off. He definitely surprised me with his professionalism and skill. This film is not exactly what I envisioned at the start, but I am extremely proud of it.

A FEW WORDS WITH
RICK CHRISTOPHERSEN
CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC DIRECTOR...

Q: What do you think of these students (most of them only in their freshman year) taking on such an ambitious project (composing over 40 minutes of music to their peer's film), in their free time (not a class assignment), and coming out on top?

Rick Christophersen: I think it is terrific that Evan Roth (as a freshman) is involved in this project. It will give them real life experience and hands-on training that will help them in their careers and education. Although an ambitious project, it seems as though they have it well organized and thought out. We encourage all of our students to collaborate with students of other disciplines in group projects of this type. It can only help them better understand the demands of this field. I wish them well with this project and hope that it is a success.