Deranged in San Diego

Last week I received a message from a friend asking if I was available to provide music for their entry into the Sand Diego 48hr film festival. I have been so busy and overwhelmed with my current workload that I immediately said, yes.

The title of the film is "Deranged." I never actually received picture to work from. I had the script, and a couple of conversations with the director.

As a general rule, I don't like working from the script. What I picture in my head is not necessarily what I will see on the screen. So the entire time I was writing I kept thinking, "I really hope we are making the same movie..."

So I started on Friday night and read through the first scene and imagined the doctor nervous in his office, trying to decide what to do, and walking hurriedly out of the hospital. And I came up with a little motif that became the main theme. It mostly revolves around the 2nd so it starts off feeling a little off kilter, but it's catchy enough to give the listener something to hold onto.

That night I composed and orchestrated 10 minutes of music. By midnight, which was my original goal for delivery, I was recording the MIDI into audio tracks to start mixing. I ended up delivering it all by 6AM.

Part of what held me up was a lack of time invested into my mixing template, so as soon as this project was done, I went through that thing and made sure everything was set up in a much better way: making sure every track had its EQ and reverb set, so I just have to plug in the audio files and start mixing.

My MIDI track template was pretty in tact, but I made a few minor tweaks to that as well, just to future-proof it. I immediately move into working on the music for the Elements show (look for a future post about that), and will be putting all my new template tweaks to the test.

I plan to clean up the mixes for "Deranged" and post a couple of excerpts on Soundcloud later this week, once my ears and fatigue have settled back into their normal routine.