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Headless
Score concept
The main idea for HEAD ON was to musically and sonically represent the duality of the film's lead character, Ari. Ari is a young guy living within a very traditional Greek family home, but as much as he feels for his roots, his rebellious nature also leads him to discover his gay sexuality as well as explore a hedonistic drug-laced lifestyle. To effect this for the score, the decision was made very early in pre-production to have Philip Brophy produce and engineer the Greek music for the film under the supervision of Irine Vela (leader of the band 'Habibis') and to then reconstruct and transform fragments from those multi-track recordings to as it were 'turn Ari's world inside-out'.
The Greek band sessions appear in the film but the resulting transformations done by Philip to represent Ari's inner turmoil, sexual explosion and psychological tensions were deemed unsuitable for the film.
Paradise
Score concept
These sketches are based on a sense of hearing music from a distance - as if it is somehow outside of one's defined listening space. Not unlike how the wind carries the sound of an outside concert across fields, or how the calliopes of a seaside carnival float across the bay late at night. Some parts of the music - the odd oboe, the harmony of a vocal fragment - rise up and above the other parts. Always, there is a constant sediment of musical activity: vaguely outlined but distinctive in its aural blanketing.
As the visuals of the film PARADISE are so overt and present in their symbolic language (ie. the narrative accruement of costume, set, lighting, camera and even performance are far from 'naturalistic'), there is no need for the music to operate as an interiorization of the characters actions. Clearly there is 'something behind' their mysterious relationships and haunted dynamics. Whereas music traditionally renders the psychological complexity of character motivation 'sonically visible' (ie. we can 'hear' that which we cannot 'see' on screen), PARADISE could benefit from a reverse strategy. If the music attempts to 'reveal/suggest' psychological nuances when they are already evident through the visuals, the resulting audio-visual combine could be melodramatic and gratuitously arty.
The hermetic world of the characters in PARADISE keeps them somewhat trapped or locked in their space. The music is presented thus as always coming from outside their domain - as if it is some force they either keep at a distance, or struggle to prevent from coming into their world. The effect of hearing the music from a distance then symbolizes this psychological measure. Dramatic tension is then less a matter of 'musical language' and more an effect of psycho-acoustic manipulation.
Musical iconography
To blend in with the aquatic rendering (implied and evident) in many of PARADISE's scenes, a 'seaside' vocabulary was developed as materials and symbols during the compositional process. Not only do some of the music's processing suggest the acoustic sensation of being submerged under water (the muted, low-frequency rumbles, the 'wah-wah' modulation of tones, etc.), but the instrumentation evokes cinematic conventions of the sea.
Ulysses strapped to the mast pole as the sirens call; harps that swirl as divers descend to the ocean floor; rising and swelling sheets of noise which mimic the crash of waves; the erotic song of the mermaid combing her hair as she sits atop a rock; deep guitar textures which heave like a galleon ship; the gaudy instrumentation heard at seaside attractions and fairs; subsonic booms which wrack the ear like tidal dumps on the sand. Sailors, sirens, fishermen, nets, hooks, beards, hair, combs, skin, breasts, boots, rope, masts: these are the musical icons connoted in sharp contrast to the suburban visual icons of washing machines, baths, laundries, fabrics, etc.
Compositional technique
The 'processing' of the sounds is based on this idea of "hearing music from a distance": hence the way in which the musical components sound altered, transfigured, modulated.
Anyone Home
Rosemary gave no direction to Philip Brophy, short of simply asking for a score. As part of the Descore events, the project was envisaged as a collaboration. Philip received a brief outline (including the above background information on danchis) of what Rosemary was planning to do with the work, and this became the basis for his score. Being familiar with Rosemary’s previous work – always a mid-way point between objective documentary and subjective reflection and visual meditation on spaces – made this easy, as Philip could envisage the work vividly.
Rosemary’s written description also mentioned the strangeness of this small museum which had recreated the late 60s social utopian domestic fantasy of an ideal small home. Clearly not coloured by any kitsch or camp reading of such a situation, Rosemary was more attracted to the theatrical emptiness of this ideal home inhabited by no-one.
Philip then proposed to compose a score about the emptiness of the space. He developed a concept employing multiple guitars and tuned strings, but overlaying them to sound like reverberant kotos. The idea was to posit the music being like someone trying to play along with something that is being channelled into their mind from the past, like they're hearing something from the past and playing along with it in the present. The temporality of the sounds was thus more important than the sounds themselves. Also, Philip explored the ‘static’ nature typical of Rosemary’s work, and restricted the harmonies to single notes and 5ths. Tuned to the guitar and laid on top are also large roto tom drums. The performance of the drums and guitar is based around finger-tapping and finger-strumming to generate a rumbling/strumming wall of sound that symbolizes the uniquely Japanese sensation of being inside a building during a slight tremor. Relative to the images, the effect is like the house itself is ‘mumuring’.The Pining Tree
The Pining Tree was developed across a two and a half year period, mostly because of the detail shading and hand-rendering required for all the still images of the animated sequences. This 'detailed stilllness' contributes a strangely 'full but stilted' feel to the animation, which in turn reflects well the psychological state of the central woman living in this netherworld removed from social contact.
The overall structure of The Pining Tree this resembles a poetic folk tale. Its phrasing and rhythms are as important as the events that unfold. Accordingly, the sound design and film score take note of this balance of action with nuance.
The main experiment in working on The Pining Tree evolved around the idea that Jennifer Sochackyj would complete the sound design for the work using sounds alone. The score would then have to fit within the sound world that Jennifer created. This generated a substantially minimal score, but the music's hesitant statement is reflective of the way that the story's woman is herself almost 'not-existing'. The score came to be emblematic of this aspect of her condition and behaviour.
Whispering in the Dark
The original collaborative plan for Whispering In The Dark called for a sound design in place of a film score. Director Lynne B. Williams imagined a soundtrack filled with the sounds of whispering, breaths and other wind textures. This was elaborated through discussions with Philip Brophy to develop a ‘wind/breath’ sound stage as sonic setting for the characters’ psychology.
This idea was based upon an interpretation of the script – which had to be clearly articulated as the first work the actors were to do after rehearsals was to record their voice-overs. This allowed Lynne to work with the actors’ relation to their text before going on set, so that they knew the ‘inner voices’ which would be playing over the scenes they would be acting. Philip recorded the voices in extreme close-up to accentuate the interior mental state of someone thinking things over in their own head.
These recordings were then used in the picture edit (by Ken Sallows) and Philip was delivered a fine cut with the voice-overs in place. After cleaning up the voice-over recordings and synching up general location atmospheres, Philip worked to make the rest of the ‘sound world’ replicate the hermetically-sealed effect of the voice-overs. All background atmosphere was edited out and the location sound severely gated and compressed, leaving only key events so as to suggest that everything heard is in fact a perceived memory with its own selective bias.
While this approach is hard to successfully convey, Lynne’s streamlined direction of the actors gave them a particularly graceful momentum. When Philip’s ‘isolationist’ sound design was joined to the shots of the actors, they appeared to be sleep-walking and entranced by their own memory and sensuality.
A theatre actor herself, Lynne had deliberately and consistently choreographed the actors’ movements. While Philip was meant to be working on sounds only, he was nonetheless inspired by the performers’ dance and on impulse worked up a couple of musical sketches based on studying the rhythms of the performers – gauging their breathing patterns, their mobility and sway as they walk, their timing in how they cast glances and looks, etc. These sketches then became the score and dominated the sound design: music became the sound of the characters’ interior states, while words – their dialogue and monologues – became the exterior states in which they lived..Maidenhead
As there is no overarching theme - or least no singular dramatic arc - to Maidenhead, the idea of scoring a 'net' of themes was deemed inappropriate. The beauty of the film is the way in which it portrays Alice nonchalantly so that the film itself seems not concerned with summing up any specific or distincitve purpose in her being. This avoidance of scriptwriting-101 is refreshing, plus it allows greater space for a psychological 'reflectiveness' in revealing and documenting Alice's character without justifying her actions.
Following the way that the Alice character is thus mostly non-plussed and seems vaguely detached from her situations and surroundings, the idea was to mesh the film score with the sound design so as to create a semi-realistic environment which nonetheless appears aurally heightened or even unlikely and inappropriate. In most cases, the sound elements are from actual and verifiable locations which connect to the onscreen depiction, but they have been modified - sometimes subtly, other times obviously. In other cases, the sounds are 'naturalistic' but they are entirelyb divorced from their onscreen location. (Philip provided these 'trans-world' sound elements and Craig Carter handled the sound editing and dialogue editing.)
The result is not so much to portray an interior mind state of Alice - remembering that she herself is mostly mildy quizzical and generally non-judgemental in the various situations she finds herself in. Instead, the sound design creates spaces which confirm that they are not what they appear, yet there is no concern expressed by Alice and others that these spaces may not be what they appear. This option has been explored in marked contast to the obvious tack of sonically and musically rendering the spaces 'dream-like' - which usually means resorting to cliches like tacky echoed flutes, spooky ambient soundscapes or surrealism-101 style-clashes.
Only The Brave
Only The Brave entailed a combination of film score and music supervision. Both were discussed between director Ana, producer Fiona and composer Philip at script level and during production and post-production. Music supervision centred on finding an appropriate song for Alex's (the central character) mother. In the script she is a singer from a 70s rock band who recorded a single back in the 70s. The only remnant Alex now has of her mother is this record, and she dreams of meeting her again one day.
Philip proposed that her band's single be a cover version of an early 70s track by Blackfeather called "Seasons of Change". After securing the clearance for using this song, Philip produced a version of it with a female singer. This song appears in the film when Alex is playing the actual version. As she goes to sleep, a new piece of music 'morphs' out of this track. This 'dream theme' is actually constructed by manipulating all the individual track elements of the cover-recording of "Seasons of Change". Philip's theme is thus assembled from the precise sonic textures of the recording, which conceptuallly relates to how Alex's mother's voice and song is echoing continually in her head.
In addition to this, a suite of themes was composed by Philip for the film's score. This suite is based around a psychological breakdown of the two teenage girls in the film, where Alex is represented by the warmth of a clarinet while her wild friend Vicki is symobilsed by guitar feedback.
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