Kai Vollprecht

Coronation Prom

What an occasion. Hundreds of thousands of people witnessed the coronation of King Charles III in the streets and parks of London, on screens at home, in pubs or in cinemas around the world.

It was a privieldge to be part of the choir at the Coronation Prom, an event put together by All Souls Music. The evening included the All Souls Orchestra, a mass choir as well as various guest artists. Among them Canadian singer-songwriter Brian Doerksen, Dutch composer and pianist Ian Mulder, viruoso Richard Lennox, Lou Fellingham, Noel Robinson and Joanne Lunn, one of Britain’s leading Baroque sopranos, as well as the internationally renown Kingdom Choir. Conductor and artistic director Michael Andrews did a fantastic job at bringing everything together and delivering a truly fantastic evening.

The program included music such as George Frideric Handel’s Zadok the Priest and Antiphon by Ralph Vaughan Williams as well as compositions from Camille Saint-Saën, Gustav Holst, John Williams and others. This was interspersed with hymns and gospel songs suitable for the occasion.

To me, performing in the Royal Albert Hall for the first time, it felt like gathering in one big living room. The quality of the music and the atmosphere in the room were truly remarkable and inspirational.

To gain a short insight behind the scenes you can find the INSPIRED Reel on social media. The whole concert can be viewed on YouTube via the link below.

WPO Composer in Residence

I am grateful for the opportunity to explore composition for orchestra in relationship with the Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra and Dominic Grier, their musical director.

The Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra has been contributing to the cultural life in Worthing since 1948 and wants to enable composers with their composer in residence scheme to bring new music to musicians and audiences alike. Their current musical director, Dominic Grier (right side of picture) brings enthusiasm and professionalism to their music making, which I have seen first hand. He is widely acknowledged as a “young conductor of distinction” and among other engagements teaches at the Royal Academy of Music in London, is principal conductor of their Junior Symphony Orchestra and guest conductor at the Royal Ballet in Birmingham.

As part of my final project at the University of Sussex I was priviledged to be able to attend a series of rehearsals with the WPO. My aim was to glean insight into composition and orchestration. I was able to identify a variety of performance techniques and details about different instruments realting to their sound and abilities. I was able to gain fascinating insights into what combination of instruments work well together and which ones do less so. When composing within the realm of computer software certain elements, such as balance, can appear very different compared to a live situation with real players. Also, what might sound too simply, almost boring, when heard in software might be a captivating moment when played by real musicians.

While I came out of the time of observation with a multitude of notes on techniques, articulations and other aspects of music that I wanted to keep in mind for future compositions, I also rediscovered my love for the sounds of certain instruments in their moments to shine; particularly the clarinet and tenor horn. In my composing I enjoy the extravagance of expression a full orchestra has but also the petite and delicate moments with tremolo strings in pianissimo creating a warm bed underneath a solo flute soaring above it. I am fascinated by the contrasts of dynamics and the power so many musicians hold in their instruments.

I am pleased that the relationship with Dominic and the WPO has grown and delevoped into this residency. I have been inspired by the rehearsals of my music we have had so far and am very thankful for the feedback and appreciation I have received from the orchestra. It is now for us to look forward to continuing to workshop music and together see new pieces of music born. I hope the orchestra enjoys this process as much as I do. Let’s together contribute something fresh to the cultural life of Worthing and beyond.

Podcast Release

I am super excited to go on a new adventure and want to invite you to join me on the journey!

The journey begins where two streams of previous work are coming together.

On the one hand, for my final projects at university, including my dissertation, I had the privilege and joy to speak to a variety of people working in music and media in different ways. Composers, artists, film directors, photographers… (If you’re interested in reading some of those conversations, check out some of the other updates on this website). Sharing journey, sharing ideas, sharing life… I found that very helpful and inspiring.

On the other hand, my project “A Musical Journey” kept growing in depth and width. The story and heart behind it, the process of making it reality, the people involved… what would be the best way of sharing the substance of it with people? (To find out more about the project, check out the project focus on this website).

These two streams have now come together and given birth to a new kind of journey – the Music & Media Podcast.

Starting with insights and conversations around “A Musical Journey” we will go on to talk to various people that work with music and media in different ways.

The podcast is designed for people within the field but also for those simply interested but without much current expertise. Through the conversations we want to connect with the person, not just the artwork. Who are they? Why are they doing what they are doing? In that I trust that you as a listener / viewer will be inspired in whatever you find to be your way of creative expression. Though I enjoy these conversations, my intent is ultimately to bring the best out of you and champion you in being creative.

Ready to join me on the journey?

To stay up to date with the latest episodes and get notified with every new release, subscribe on your prefered podcast platform or YouTube, follow on social media or subscribe to updates here on the website to get email notifications.

To find out more about the podcast, visit the podcast page on my website.

Thanks goes to Dan Smith who designed the logo for the podcast.

Interview with Martin Smith (Silverbox Multimedia)

Martin is founder of Silverbox Multimedia. He is passionate to help children & young people explore filmmaking. In our conversation we spoke about the different skills children pick up in the club. But besides screenwriting, acting, filming, editing, and others, there are so many more competences they come away with – skills that are not only useful for filmmaking but for life. In closing, Martin reflected on his own creative writing. Are we keeping childlike wonder and limitless creativity at play? Or are we doing the adult thing of doubting ideas before we have even given them time to breathe?

KAI:
Hi Martin, great to hear from you today! Could you tell us about the work you do with Silverbox Multimedia and the way you enable children to express themselves creatively with filmmaking? I know you also aim to help them engage with social media in a safe and positive way. How do you do that?

MARTIN:
Yeah, so that’s actually a relatively new thing that we’re moving into. We’ve been working with children for a long time, helping them engage with filmmaking in different ways. The social media element has always been difficult. From a business perspective there is obviously a marketing expectation that everything you do would be plastered all over social media and you shout and scream about everything from the rooftops but obviously there is a sensitivity around social media and young people. For a long time we actually took the position as a company that we weren’t going to post anything on social media in any way, shape or form. The activity was key and engaging the kids was key. One of the things that the lockdown during COVID-19 taught us though was that as soon as the schools closed we had absolutely no presence whatsoever.

When we’re in the schools we were quite loud – kids love us. There are some schools we walk through and it is like being celebrities there. The kids come racing over from the other end the playground. That’s wonderful in those little closed communities, but when it came to actually having to market ourselves further we found what we’d done is shot ourselves massively in the foot by not engaging with social media. So, what we had to do is consult with some solicitors to talk about the best approach for us in that. We obviously had to make sure that our systems were going to be very robust in order to be compliant with everything. But what that’s done is that it led us into a position where we thought the more we engage with students on how to use social media in a positive way, the more there will be an understanding of what we’re doing and hopefully that gets the parents on board as well. At the end of the day it really is the parents that are most concerned about how their children’s data and images are being used and I completely understand.

Generally, when children are involved in the kind of activities we do, there tends to be a bit of an understanding that they are techie anyway. The kids want to get involved in these things but they’re not necessarily old enough to have their own social media account. Perhaps a well-managed social media account being run by third party is the best way for them to engage with it because they know it can be done safely. In the classes we are quite open about how we go about doing things and why we want to do them in the right way. An example is that in the past, when they made a film they would put their name in the credits at the end. Now, because we don’t know at any given time when they make a film how it’s going to be used and what platform it might end up appearing on, they don’t put their names at the end of every film. That just helps to protect the identity of the children a little bit. One of our rules now is ‘if it’s got your face on it, you don’t put your name on it’ and ‘if it’s got your name on it, you don’t put your face on it’. The way we’ve gotten around the credits is that if they are acting in the film, we take a nice portrait of them and put that at the end of it. That’s how they know that they were involved in that film. So yeah, it’s all those kinds of strategies that have sort of come out of lockdown for us, I suppose.

KAI:
More generally speaking, how would you describe your own journey with filmmaking?

MARTIN:
When I first went freelance as a filmmaker, I had just been working with a company that specialized in working with community groups and small businesses. I went out on my own and had to think about what sort of things mattered to me. Having a passion for filmmaking and wanting to become the next Spielberg was great but when I tried to get out there and started working reality sort of set in. There were bills to pay and you know, all these other things… I had to lean into another part of my passion.

What I really enjoyed was being involved with these community groups, especially the working with adults with learning disabilities. We would create animations for them or work with low income families to create activities that they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. That was a really nice way to spend my time and it was really rewarding. When I set up Silverbox films, the original goal was to try and be a bit of everything and have an educational slant to it. I got lucky with one film council fund that paid me to go into a school to work with children on a short film. While I was working with that school I did a lot of consultation with one of the teachers and we came to the conclusion that there was a demand for an after school club type activity. We ran one as a test bed and found another school and another and another… pre-lockdown we had grown to about 10 different schools on any given week with additional schools running holiday projects and others doing curriculum-based projects. It became multifaceted in that way. Silverbox itself is still working with small businesses and everything we learn on those shoots we bring into the clubs that we do. Just before Christmas I was just working on a BFI short film. I learned an awful lot from that shoot and have already started applying that in our workshops.

KAI:
How do you do that? How do you take experience from one to the other?

MARTIN:
I’m sure this is probably an experience that you’ve had, that you go to university and you are taught that there is a certain way of doing things, but then when you actually go and do the job you find that it’s not quite as cut and dry as that. In the real world, whether it’s through necessity or possibly even laziness, people don’t do things the way that they say they do it on paper. So, when you actually get in the field and start experiencing those little quirks it allows you to show the practical reality of what filmmaking is like. We try to apply that rather than the other.

To give you an example of that, one of the things we encountered on the BFI shoot was the radio calls that were being done by the team. They were using fairly generic radio calls, but what struck me was that I’d never seen them done in such a formal way before and a few of them I had maybe heard previously but never known what they were. For instance, I kept hearing this one particular one coming through and I eventually asked what it was. It turned out that it was the radio call they were doing every time the lead actor needed to go to the toilet. That’s one of the things that we’ve brought into the club. Frequently, you know working with children, they’ll put their hand up and ask, “Can I go to the toilet?” but now, instead of that we have a radio call that’s kind of like “Oh, Sir 10-1”. We know what they’re talking about, they know what they’re talking about and it’s immersing them in that language.

KAI:
And it creates a sense of community as well, doesn’t it?

MARTIN:
Exactly! And that is ultimately it with the kids. One of the things that makes them come back time and time again are the in-jokes and the silliness that comes with the activities that we do.

KAI:
That’s great. Why do you think is it important to help young people engage with technology and filmmaking?

MARTIN:
I think it’s more important than it’s ever been because the world that they’re going to grow up in is the world of technology. It’s already here but it’s only going to get bigger, bolder, and more immersive. The first sort of really good example I had from my own life about the importance of technology was when I was living with a bricklayer. I went to school with him. He left school and went straight into bricklaying. One day he came home and just said to me, “You know what Martin, I’m going to go out on my own. I’m going to leave this company that I’m working for and do it myself.” Then literally in the next breath he said, “Ah, but if I do that I’m going to need a website… and a business card… and I need some photos of the work that I’ve done…” He started listing all these things and they were all multimedia based. The big takeaway for him was that he hadn’t touched a computer in nearly 10 years. He suddenly realized he’d been left behind completely and technology, even for a bricklayer, was suddenly one of the most important skills he needed. So for me, if even bricklayers are getting to the point where they can’t make a future for themselves as successfully without the technology, what hope do the rest of us have?

KAI:
I see what you are saying. I got involved with cameras and filmmaking when I was very young. You pick up skills without realizing it and then figure your way through.

MARTIN:
This is it. It’s certain passive skills as well. Say for instance the family of a child has a home computer and it is a PC. When they come to the club they encounter a Mac for the first time. The first thing that we have to do is teach them how to use it because they have never used one. Almost immediately they are more employable because they’ve got that multi-use thing going for them. I know adults that are completely stumped when they walk in the room. They get our laptop for the first time and if they’ve worked on PC their whole lives they won’t touch it initially. I do courses for adults on occasions as well.

KAI:
Is that more difficult?

MARTIN:
Well, I tend to have to tell the adults to sit down less because they tend to be sat down most of the time. With kids, they’re running around like mad things, but when it comes to them, if I put a Mac in front of them that they have never touched before and show them Adobe Premiere for the first time… I can teach a group of eight-year-olds how to do basic editing in less than an hour. They will then have that skill for the rest of their lives. If I do the same workshop with a group of adults, it will take me an entire weekend to teach them the same amount of skills. It’s been true for the last 10 years. The kids are growing up around technology. They’re not afraid to throw themselves at it and get involved. That’s why you need to capture that at this age, because as soon as that fear sets in they’re going to get left behind.

KAI:
It’s life skills, as you just said, isn’t it? Whether it’s filming, editing, or things like, “I’m going to have a go” or “I’m going to try and see how it works” – those are also kind of skills and they will have for life.

MARTIN:
On top of that we stress that filmmaking is a team making exercise. One of the early things that we always encounter with the kids is their inability to work in a team. You may have some children who are only children or you may have some that are just generally not very good at sharing. But in filmmaking that’s impossible. You want that kind of leading voice, but if you’re too controlling it all falls apart; yet if you’re not controlling enough it also falls apart. So there is some level of compromise they have to figure out amongst themselves, finding a working dynamic that works for them. That’s also really important.

KAI:
What age group are we talking about here specifically? You mentioned 8-year-olds.

MARTIN:
Yes, so generally we tend to be with ages 8 to 16. More typically it would be ages 8 to around 12 and we found that, given the sort of activities that we do and the age group we have, parents are more inclined towards the childcare aspect at that younger age. If you’re getting them at an older age it’s much nicer because they’re definitely passionate about it and they want to be there, but because they’re that much older they’re just starting to discover their own freedom a little bit. They don’t necessarily want to go and hang out in a hall and be told what to do, they want to go hang out on a street corner and figure it out for themselves. It’s not that there is a demand for it it’s just there’s less of a demand for it. In the light of that we decided to concentrate our efforts. Some of our students are growing up now and they’re getting a bit older. The YouTube club that we run on a Saturday, for example, is starting to become more and more populated by those older students that we’ve worked with in the past.

KAI:
Can you talk a bit about the kind of projects you do?

MARTIN:
The after-school clubs are typically more of a drop-in type of situation. We’ve got two hours once a week for 13 weeks to make something of significance. What we tend to do there is push skills. We’ll look at a little bit of script writing, a little bit of acting for camera and at how post-production works. We then make a series of 60 second short films. Part of the reason for that is because then they can kind of try something and decide if they like it or not. If not, they can move on to the next thing. It’s quite fast paced and there is a lot of energy in the room. What they’ll end up with is just a series of 60 second mad little experiments. They don’t tend to go anywhere. They tend to be more just for their own personal use, to reflect on and take those skills wherever they want to take them.

Then we do our holiday schools. Those are our opportunity to try and do something a little more ambitious. We will typically make 5 to 10 minute short films with them. We work with them over five days 9 o’clock in the morning to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, so we’ve got a lot more contact time and a lot more ability to really stretch things out. We will write a film on Monday, shoot it Tuesday, Wednesday and some of Thursday and do post- production along the way as well. By the time they’re done they’ve got a real kind of robust Hollywood style short film that tends to, I’d like to say, exceed the expectations of what parents think they’re going to produce in that time.

The YouTube club is something new where we’re starting to try and engage more directly with social media. We’re looking at YouTube videos and try to replicate the more popular formats. It might be something like a list video. We get the kids to come up with 10 things about a subject and they will talk about it and create the video for it. We also do tutorials, that’s the thing we’ve done predominantly so far. We’re starting to teach the kids a film skill of some sort, let’s say ‘How to turn an actor into a ghost so that they see through’. We teach that for a couple of weeks and then get them to make a short film with that effect in mind; then we have them make a YouTube style tutorial, explaining to other kids how to do the same thing. It’s that old thing of, ‘The best way to learn something is to teach it’. They learn it and then teach it back so that it’s really stuck in their heads.

KAI:
Have you thought of working together with other after school clubs such as theatre or similar?

MARTIN:
We’re hoping to expand our own offering in some ways. We are liaising with a comic book artist at the moment as well as a drama and an art teacher. We’re hoping that some of these new offerings would take the Silverbox ethos in terms of the way that we teach and in the way that we do things and move into those other areas. The other obvious advantage is that they kind of complement each other as well. For example, when we do a holiday club it might be that we can have those activities happening simultaneously and kind of bleed into one another. But that’s a little bit of a dream for us at the moment. We’re so well known for our filmmaking and that is really what takes up the majority of our time. But yeah, we’ll see.

KAI:
That sounds great. Where can you see Silverbox Multimedia going?

MARTIN:
We would like to get to the point where we’ve got a package that really works and that is franchiseable. What I would like to do is to take what we’re doing and spread it across the whole country. There are already instances of organizations doing this. I’m aware of the Pauline Quirke Academy, for example. They already do a lot of theatre and filmmaking and they have rolled that out across a lot of the country. I think what we produce is different to what they do. I think we’ve got something to offer that would be interesting to people all over the country. I’ve done some research into that though and before you can make that kind of push, they say, it’s good to try and make everything as process lead as possible so that anyone can come in and pick up almost immediately. Just shortly before lockdown that’s the process we had started going through.

KAI:
Very interesting. More generally speaking, how important do you think it is to empower young people to be creative?

MARTIN:
I think it’s really important. I’ve done a lot of work in close contact with schools and I think if you interview any reasonably minded primary school teacher at the moment they will tell you that creativity has been stripped out of the curriculum almost completely. Unless you’ve got a teacher who’s by default passionate about creativity there’s going to be less and less opportunities for children to express their creativity. I’ve actually had some head teachers approach me about running my courses in their school because it literally ticks a creativity box that they need to fulfil, and they don’t have the resources to do it within their own class times. I mean in terms of importance, I don’t know if I need to justify the importance of creativity itself, but I think what we should be most concerned about is the fact that creativity is not being given the space that it really should have in primary education. As we’ve already said, there are so many reasons why that’s going to be to the detriment of young people’s careers in the future. I feel that needs to be addressed and I think that’s something Silverbox is doing quite a good job of.

KAI:
We briefly talked about this earlier, but what kind of skills do you think the children pick up that are not only useful for film making but for life?

MARTIN:
I would say one of the biggest ones that always really stands out to me is visualization. It’s not one that immediately jumps to people’s minds when you talk about creative skills. You think of creating some sort of art, writing, or similar… but the process of imagining something and then making it real, that’s what I mean. A lot of times I’m having a conversation with some of our younger students, saying, “We could do this” or “We could do that” or “You could write this or that” … and I’m looking at them thinking, “You can’t actually imagine this, can you? You don’t have that faculty at the moment, it still needs to be developed.” What you then watch is, typically after the first time they make a film, they put pen to paper and write it out, then they shoot and edit it and see the final result. Suddenly a little switch goes off in their brain and when you have the same conversation with them on the second film they suddenly get it! They can now imagine the steps that need to be taken. That is an interesting process to watch unfold, because if you can’t imagine a process or the steps you need to take to get somewhere, I don’t know how you can get anywhere. I’m talking about my business and franchising it, making it quote on quote as ‘idiot proof as possible’. Part of the reason that’s important from a business perspective is that you want to put people in an environment where they’re going to succeed. You want to take away as many variables as possible, but that is essentially taking away the need for imagination. You can do that to a point, but there is a point at which the human element of that kind of job role is going to take over and you’re need them to make informed and imaginative decisions. That’s really what’s going to set someone apart. If they follow the process, great. If they can make that process their own, that’s where they’re going to excel.

KAI:
Very interesting. I suppose you still want to uphold certain standards. Making it ‘idiot proof’, as you say, so that it works, but also having quality and excellence.

MARTIN:
This is it. It’s being able to communicate what those standards are effectively. One of our main guiding rules we have in our clubs is, “You leave everything better than you found it”. There is this real thing with kids that goes like, “We will clean up our own mess, but anything that isn’t our own mess we will leave alone.” What ends up happening is that you get these moments where a child has been eating popcorn or something similar. They’ve spilled some and they’ve been sharing it with their friends and their friends have spilled some as well. When it is time to clean up, the only person that gets rallied into the job is the one who brought the popcorn even though they all made the mess. So we say that not only is it the group’s mess, but we’re all required to tidy up. Not only do we tidy up our own mess, but we also tidy up the mess that was left before us. If everyone did that there’d be nothing to tidy up, right? We try to take that mentality into everything we do. It has to be left better than it was, and the world just has to be a much nicer and happier place. That’s how we want to leave everything that we do.

KAI:
That’s great to hear. Obviously, I’m passionate about filmmaking, but it’s great to hear about all these values that you share with the children too!

One last question. We have been talking about adults and children how you are approaching them differently in terms of teaching them. Do you think there is anything you can learn from the children?

MARTIN:
They teach me all the time. I think that’s one of the things that keeps me wanting to go back and do it time and time again. It’s the obvious stuff. Working with kids in that way keeps you young. I know all the new social media platforms, I know what all the new YouTube videos are, I know who the new YouTube creators are because they tell me. And if I don’t know, I’m a loser, so… I have to stay up to date! But on top of that, what I will say, particularly from a writing perspective, is that one of the things professional writers spend their entire careers trying to make sure they don’t do is lose the childlike wonder and a child’s completely unclosed minds.

I get the 8 or 9-year-olds and we do some writing for a film. If I ask what it could be about, they say something like, “Ah, it’s going to be about a man and a rocket ship! And then this happens and then that…!” They have absolutely no worries about the fact that a) we can’t shoot any of that and b) none of it makes any sense. They’re all just ideas that don’t really meet in the middle. If you only go a few years on, working with maybe some of the teenagers, and I ask what we should do a film about, I spend the next hour trying to draw something from them. You have to try to make them think about a character, or a list of jobs that they could have. I’m often simply met with a wall of blank faces.

From my perspective, when I do my own personal writing, I try to keep that sort of childlike essence at play. I try not to do that adult thing of doubting the idea before I’ve even started to write it because I think that’s what happens an awful lot. You often don’t even give the idea time to breathe because you can see all the reasons why it won’t work, but you can’t see the reasons why it will. Kid’s don’t care about that. They just think, “It’s cool, I just want it in there. We can do it, people are going to love it!” I think that’s a really important lesson to take away.

KAI:
I want to see that film about the rocket ship now. I’m quite excited!

MARTIN:
We actually do have one music video of a rocket that I might be able to send you a link to. I’ll see what I can dig out.

KAI:
Thank you, Martin! I am grateful for your time, it was interesting to hear from you about your work with the children & young people. All the best!

To find out more about Silverbox Multimedia and to get in contact, visit the website.

Sussex Film Festival 2022

It was great news to hear that “A Musical Journey – England” was very well received at the Sussex Film Festival this year. The video is the third part of a series in which we travelled across Europe to compose original music and capture performances as well as surroundings visually in creative ways.

The film was awareded 5 stars and won “best club film” as well as “best use of sound” at the festival. The judges remarks concluded with…

“A beautifully composed and played piece of original music that has artistically been visualised by a creative filming and editing team.”
Judges Remarks, The Sussex Film Festival 2022

Thanks to the team who helped bring it all together. For this particular video, Rory Innerd (Composer, Camera, Performing & Recoding, Mixing & Mastering), Norton Goffe (Drone Operator, Colour Grading), Tim Hartnell (Atmos & SFX) and Josue Tello (Graphics).

Thanks to SDFM, the South Downs Film Makers, for screening the series and giving feedback on it in the club, as well as submitting it as an entry to the festival.

Thanks to the judges of the Sussex Film Festival 2022 for their appreciation and remarks on the film.

Interview with Stephen Montgomery (Vivid Broadcast)

Stephen is Head of Production at Vivid Broadcast. His role is to technically and creatively figure out how to actually make the jobs work. In our time together we discussed the strenghts different media, such as graphics, film and music have and what happens when they come together. We went on to think about media as a communicator in society and the responsibility that comes with that. Are we ever asking what values and messages come across in the music, films or shows we are engaging with?

KAI:
Hi Stephen, it’s great to speak to you today! You are part of the team at Vivid Broadcast. It would be great to hear what you do and what a day at work looks like.

STEPHEN:
I think for us every day is different. That is part of the challenge but also part of the fun. I don’t think I could ever do a job where I was doing the same thing every day. Financially, that is where a company like ours needs to get to because there’s a lot of wasted resources in reinventing what we’re doing every time. When you broadcast a football match you know where the cameras go. You turn up at the stadium, two in the middle, one for each goal… you shoot it and go home. That’s very economical because you can repeat it again and again and again. On other productions you have to come up with new strategies all the time. There is a repetitive nature to what we do, but equally it’s very bespoke.

KAI:
What is your specific role in the company?

STEPHEN:
On paper I’m down as Head of Production. I tend to get involved in anything that’s new. That involves working out how we do things. We might have won a contract to do something, but we’ve got to work out how to actually do it, both technically and creatively. That’s my role.

KAI:
With so many other media companies out there, what makes Vivid stand out? Where is your sort of place do you think?

STEPHEN:
I think we’re sort of a middle ground size. There’s a lot of bigger companies, but that makes them potentially less flexible and nimble. Equally though, we do have a lot of experience and size that enables us to deliver something big. We do try and do a lot of very bespoke projects. A lot of what we do is maybe too complicated for some of those who simply turn up and do the football matches. They’re not set up to be able to work out how to do something different.

KAI:
How did you come to do what you’re doing now?

STEPHEN:
It was kind of by accident. I initially wanted to be a sound engineer. For the year 10 work experience at school I was supposed to go to a recording studio, but my contact left and went to a TV studio. He basically said, “I’ll find someone else at the recording studio to take you on work experience”, but I asked whether I could come with him to his new place. I didn’t want anything to do with television, but when you are 14 years old you don’t mind so much. Obviously, it was the right choice, and I like it in TV now.

But through the COVID period a lot of people I know, who were maybe not working so much because events got cancelled and things, have gone for a walk in the woods and thought, “I should be doing this more often instead of sitting in a wet car park at the back of a football stadium trying to hold a cable in a socket hoping I don’t get electrocuted…” Whether it’s the technical or creative side, there is a lot of pressure on the kind of work we do and a lot of people that I know have been reflecting on that. It’s not that it’s not rewarding, you know, finishing a production is a bit like climbing a mountain. It’s hard work but when you get to the top it’s like “Ah, great. Let’s do it again!” It’s not that it’s not rewarding, but sometimes you are asking, “Was it really worth all that effort, just for people to watch a football being kicked around on a pitch? Or to hear the songs of a concert?” You do find you ask some soul-searching questions.

KAI:
Some of my research is about multimedia. For example, what music can do that picture can’t or what film can do that text can’t. You could even compare what a graphic can deliver in comparison to a five-minute video. Do you have any thoughts on the strengths different media have and what happens when they come together?

STEPHEN:
I think more and more we’re seeing a convergence of media. Whilst what you say is true, it’s also dangerous to say, “Pictures speak louder than words, so we should just use pictures.” At the moment I’m working on a film series with five episodes of about 15 minutes each. In those episodes we are talking to various experts about a particular topic. We’re very aware that any of them could talk for an hour and it would all be good. Yet, we will only have room for them to speak for about 2 minutes. We know that those 15-minute films are going to be more powerful than just letting them talk and talk, but we’re also very aware that if someone is inspired by watching 15 minutes with a couple of minutes of this and that, they are quite likely to want to go and dig deeper. Alongside the film series therefore we may need to make the full interviews available for people to watch on our website or do a podcast series alongside it, which is a more curated but longer version of it. So yes, some things are more powerful, but I think the power is really in the all-encompassing, holistic approach across all media forms.

If you have a look at the BBC Charter and things like it, approximately 10 years ago they started doing what they called 360-degree commissioning. It meant that you couldn’t ever just have a radio programme or a television series. It needed to hit online, radio… and so on. They are a bit better at that on the radio. When you listen to radio they say, “BBC online, on demand, on digital…”, but that’s where it comes from. This concept is not just them trying to flood you, it’s actually that each of these different media forms has their own strengths. None of them are strong enough by themselves. You need all of them to work together to actually communicate a message. In the words of the BBC, “to inform, entertain and educate.”

KAI:
That makes sense, yes. When you talk about the different strengths, what would you say they are? For example, what strengths do music, text or video have individually?

STEPHEN:
Well, purely off the top of my head, music is emotive. You can bring about an emotional response. There are downsides to things as well. Video, for example, can be very inspiring but attention span might become an issue. Whereas when you have something that’s just audio based you can hold people’s attention for longer.

KAI:
I like to think about media as a communicator. I was talking to a composer recently and we were asking whether it is just ‘great art’ that we are producing or whether we are aware that we are actually ‘communicating’. What are the values? What is the message? What are we telling people? Not just how we say something, but the content of it.

STEPHEN:
I think when it comes to music, by itself it’s only ever going to do a certain thing. But when you combine music with images, you start saying something. The reason why I think music is so powerful is that you can take the same 30 second sequence of drama or news footage, or whatever, and put some sad strings under it and then play it again with some happy-go-lucky kind of music and you’ve got a different film. That music has transformed the message that you’re telling in a way that just changing the images or the order of them, the editing, the actors, or anything else wouldn’t have done. It’s almost the one single element that can change the message compared to every other part of what makes up a piece of video or multimedia.

KAI:
Do you think filmmakers or composers are aware that they are communicating content, not simply making great art?

STEPHEN:
Yes, I mean, particularly if you listen to some of the things people like Hans Zimmer say. There is a trailer to a masterclass of his. The bit they used in that is where he is talking about how a sequence of notes is talking, telling a story…

KAI:
… and answering a phrase, yes.

STEPHEN:
Exactly, I think he says, “That’s the question and this the answer.”

KAI:
I’ve been thinking a lot about what values are being communicated in media and art. Do you have any thoughts on that?

STEPHEN:
I don’t think there’s any kind of misrepresentation. If someone wants to communicate something then what we’re asking is, “What are their values?”, not necessarily what values are coming across in the film. Unless you’re looking at, you know, low budget productions, student films or similar, I wouldn’t say there are sloppy film makers who accidentally communicate values that are not what they want to say. People are a very deliberate. They will use certain colours in the costumes because there’s certain values, emotions, and character traits they want to communicate. Everything is very deliberate, planned, and intentional. I don’t think the question is ever really “What is a film telling us?”, I think what we’re asking is, “What is the filmmaker or director telling us?”

KAI:
Do you think that there’s a certain responsibility that comes with that? In one sense anyone could say anything if they have the finances for the production. Is there a place for thinking about what we do and communicate in society?

STEPHEN:
I watched a documentary at the weekend called The Disappearance of My Mother (2019), which is about an Italian supermodel who essentially got a bit disenchanted with everything. She got older and shunned the camera. She didn’t want to be in front of the lens anymore. Her son became a cinematographer though and wanted to make a film about her. In this documentary you can see the argument about her not wanting to be on camera. Yet her son wants to tell the story about how she doesn’t want to be on camera… It is very self- referential. By actually making the documentary you are going against the very thing that you’re trying to say, which he actually was trying to say in the opposite way… In some ways what he did was slightly cruel. So yes, responsibility is a big issue there. Was he being responsible in exposing his mother and going against her wishes? Or was she complicit in the whole thing and making it up? I don’t know.

KAI:
Great food for thought. Thank you, Stephen. It has been great to speak to you!

To find out more about Vivd, head over and visit their website.

Interview with Lewis Rapkin (Oscillator Media)

Lewis is founder of video and music production company Oscillator Media and has worked with the likes of Dolby Laboratories, MTV, Discovery Channel, VOX News and The New York Times. In our conversation he shared how composing music as well as editing video for projects shapes his creative process from the start. We covered several topics, including how involving an orchestra in a production is not only an aesthetic decision but also a practical and financial consideration. Are midi input and plug-ins going to take over? Or are they providing a bridge for non-classically trained creatives to cross over and explore writing for orchestra?

KAI:
Hi Lewis, thank you for your time today! To start with, how would you describe yourself as an artist?

LEWIS:
Well, I guess there are two sides to what I do for work, which is mostly editing documentaries and composing scores for documentaries and nonfiction TV shows. Besides that I make my own music and films. Sometimes the two paths cross and sometimes they stay separate – both are cool.

KAI:
Have you always been interested in both – composition and filmmaking?

LEWIS:
Yes, although I didn’t really start doing music professionally for film until later. I had several years working, editing and assistant editing – more post-production. Music was something I played in bands at clubs. It had been a part of my life from a young age but the two paths only crossed after around 5, 6 or 7 years of editing. Part of the editor’s job was choosing music and finding a vibe for a show; depending on the show sometimes it’s great to get to work with composers but oftentimes it’s more library kind of music. Part of it was also a frustration with libraries and another was me slowly trying to stretch myself. I started with a track or two for a show which then turned into three, four and five. It’s progressed like that over the years. Just sort of being in the edit room, working with music, working with the edit and bringing the many years of music that I had into that space.

KAI:
Is a lot of your work then from home now after COVID-19? Has that impacted your work in any way?

LEWIS:
Not really. A few years ago I moved to working from home anyways. Part of that was simply the type of things I was doing. At the time I was working with smaller production companies and they were cool with that. It was helpful not to have to rent a post-production facility. Earlier on though I worked for bigger companies and they wanted everybody in an office. So yeah, when COVID did hit I was kind of already set up with my own studio gear and was comfortable with working remotely with producers and directors without being in the same room. It wasn’t too difficult of a transition for me.

KAI:
That’s cool. And you started Oscillator Media, didn’t you?

LEWIS:
Yes, that was in 2017. I was doing a project with Dolby and Google. I was directing and producing… actually kind of doing all of it – music, editing and so on… and yeah, there wasn’t a production company associated with it really. So, I thought I would take it on. It was actually a really great project. It was one of their first Dolby Atoms ones. I got to conceive the score and the 3D sound for it. Playing with mixing music in three dimensions was pretty awesome. I still work for bigger companies for sure, but it’s through Oscillator Media then.

KAI:
What fascinates you about music? What attracted you to it?

LEWIS:
It depends on how far you want to go back. I feel like you just ‘got the bug’ or you don’t… it’s never really been much of a conscious choice. It’s more like there’s always an instrument so there’s always something… There’s always got to be a thing. That’s why it was somewhat serendipitous. Playing in bands and clubs around Brooklyn started to fizzle out as people were getting older and began to have jobs. I kind of picked up another wind with music, which was doing films and series and things like that. It’s a totally different experience to write and play music for a performance type situation versus a film. It also stretched me creatively to be like, “Okay, now we’re making music to live in this world of this story in this film.”

KAI:
Something I find interesting is your point about the creative process for writing songs for a band versus composing for a film and how they are different. How do you approach that, creatively speaking?

LEWIS:
Yeah, I mean part of it comes simply down to the difference of where inspiration is being pulled from. For a film there’s story and there’s characters, especially with documentaries. There’s always something tangible out there in the world. Whatever that subject is drives the music. Talking about bands, I have been in some that do have a concept or some sort of sound that they are going for, for sure. You are servicing that project, that idea, that sound… and with films it’s just whatever the content of the film is. That then becomes the primary inspiration, the thing to draw from and create something around.

KAI:
Do you find it easier to have something to work around, say a character, or start from scratch and have a sort of ‘blank sheet of paper’?

LEWIS:
I like having a little something. What’s really special in my situation is that I edit as well, so I enter the process quite a bit earlier then a composer traditionally would. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true for big narrative features, I haven’t worked on those before, but at least in my world what usually happens is that the film gets cut, locked and at the very end you’re sending a kind of already made film to the composer to do something with. In my case I start where the edit starts. The film has been put together, certainly things have been shot, subjects, characters… there’s ideas floating around. But for me, the initial spark for creativity in music comes around the same time as the initial spark for the edit. “What’s this film going to be?”, “How do we want to put this together?” The music kind of involves from the start and to have that has got a kind of energy to it for me. It’s like making something and not really knowing what it is, but there are all these signposts to pull from. That’s definitely easier than a complete blank sheet of, “Okay… what…”

KAI:
So while you’re editing you’re already asking what would work musically. Do you think there are advantages for composers to be editors too? Obviously not everybody has both skill sets. Whereas traditionally composers would get a locked edit of the film, you seem to have more flexibility through entering the process much earlier. Can you see advantages?

LEWIS:
Absolutely, I mean you’re choosing and creating a feeling to the film and music is essential for that. It impacts the pace of it as well and a lot of that usually takes place in the edit, particularly with documentaries. Without it you would normally choose temp tracks, whether they’re from a library or from your favourite bands or composers. You’re trying to use all this music from elsewhere out in the world to fit and help propel what you have in front of you. If you’re creating a completely original score while the story is being made as well, you definitely have the advantage of being able to take the film in an original or new direction. Things develop organically and originally.

You can also start treating themes earlier on in the process, making the film feel more cohesive, because you’re not pulling music from all these disparate places that weren’t created in service of that. You start creating themes, ideas and characters that relate. It definitely helps to mould the film earlier on, rather than trying to either slap on original music at the end or, I think what happens more frequently, for composers to get a, “Here’s the temp track and we love this… could you do something like this, but not totally like this…”

KAI:
Part of my research is thinking about orchestral music. Some of my colleagues who are coming more from an electronic music background often ask, “Why are you interested in classical music?” Firstly, I explain that ‘orchestral music’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘classical music’. There is a lot of contemporary film music that I wouldn’t consider classical. We have had discussions like, “In a world of more and more electronics, is there still a place for an orchestra?”, I wonder what your perspective is on that.

LEWIS:
For sure there’s a place for an orchestra. I mean there’s a place for anything and everything; it’s whatever serves the film. I was part of a composer’s collective for a while and I remember one guy shared this story. He was working on a film with someone and they finally had the budget to work with a big orchestra. They were super excited and wanted to go ahead. He put the whole thing together, arranged it and recorded it. Then the filmmaker said, “Wait…. I actually don’t think I want an orchestra…” On the one hand it’s an annoying showbiz thing, but on the other hand it was that process of ‘just because you can doesn’t mean you should.’ The flip side of that is that there are different types of scores for different types of movies. Depending on what the vibe is that you’re trying to go for changes whether you should have an orchestra or not. I hope orchestras keep being in films. I feel like they are a primary source of income to keep orchestras going.

KAI:
Do you have any thoughts on how the orchestral sound might change as composers include more electronics and other things?

LEWIS:
I think it is changing already. I’m not a super expert on this but I feel like there’s a good amount of contemporary classical composers and musicians that are pulling from both traditions and integrating more orchestral instrumentation into modern contemporary types of scores. Also, people have access to software to score very easily now. I don’t have to be a music theory head and full on into writing on paper for a whole orchestra to get started. People that aren’t traditionally trained as orchestrators can start doing that sort of thing. I think it’s both; people who are classically trained are becoming more interested in contemporaries to move orchestral music forward and on the other side people who are more used to working on a laptop with MIDI are starting to play around with those types of tools. As that continues people will certainly think, “Cool, I did that for a while in Logic… what happens if I start hiring some musicians? What is it like to actually hear this played by an orchestra?”

KAI:
When you are composing then, do you use sample libraries or do you try and get musicians in, if the budget allows?

LEWIS:
It’s a budget thing and it’s often also a time thing, particularly with TV shows. Sometimes the pace of the show is very fast and things are shifting and shifting… you don’t want to pay to record something to then have to change it later on… I noticed for sure market difference with something that I’ve arranged in software or just in my own studio to then giving it to musicians to play. It’s like, “Wow, now it really pops.” So whenever possible, yeah for sure.

KAI:
Is there something you would really like to do in your career going forward?

LEWIS:
I’d love having more opportunities to work with more musicians. That would be my want. Because it happens, but as I mentioned before it depends on budget as well as time. I talk about this with other composers quite a bit in terms of session players, or players in general. I think this is true in popular music as well. Sample libraries, the packs, the computer writing and the sound of it has gotten so good that you really have to want it to say, “All right. The client thinks this sounds good, everybody thinks it sounds good… but I think I have to get a live take of this.” That takes discipline and usually means you’re spending money that could have gone in your own pocket. You have to really want it. I think for me, in the future I would like to be in a situation where budget and time wise I can take my music, go to a studio, spend a lot of time with musicians and see them bring their own thing to it. That would be what I would like to do more of.

KAI:
I’m sure the musicians would be grateful too.

I just want to briefly come back to you wearing different hats in productions, sometimes editing as well as composing. Do you find it easier to do the whole process yourself or is there space for you to pull other people into the boat too?

LEWIS:
Again, it’s budget and time. Things in the edit change so frequently from day to day, from week to week… So, in terms of bringing in other collaborators on the music side, it can be hard because things are changing. Work can be happening and then the next day there’s a whole new direction. I would say that I certainly love to collaborate with people but I think the initial edit and ideas for the show have typically been a more solitary process for me. I’m kind of in my own space for that. I’m not in an office chit chatting with people coming in and out. It’s usually a pretty lengthy debrief from a director or producer about what we’re trying to do and then a bit of hands off, doors closed, I’m in the space, what can I do with it.

KAI:
Do you find yourself get stuck sometimes creatively in that process? Do you think if you were in an office environment you would get ideas from others? Have you found ways to overcome those sorts of blockages if you work a lot by yourself?

LEWIS:
Creative blocks? Absolutely. In most cases I’m working with people I’ve worked with before or have a pretty good working relationship with, so it’s usually not so much hitting a brick wall. For sure, hey, raise your hand and someone will come and help. Everybody working on it wants that. People want to be involved in the process. They want to be as helpful as possible. It’s a creative and collaborative environment. It’s this kind of give and pull of giving the composer space to come up with something, but certainly if there’s any kind of wall being hit, let’s get other heads on it and figure out what to do about it.

In your own space you go for hikes or walks and try to find other things, whether it’s books or movies. You just keep feeding the brain things that are not necessarily what you’re working on and then usually that will dislodge whatever is being blocked. Walking around in nature in and of itself is always quite therapeutic and likewise with other inspirations, if you’re reading something else, watching something else, listening to something else, and just break away from trying to solve whatever problem you’re trying to solve, those other impetus, at least for me, often break through whatever I was frustrated with.

KAI:
You just mentioned listening to other people’s music. Is that something you do regularly to get inspiration or do you find yourself generally inspired in your own space.

LEWIS:
I would say it’s not that I am inspired simply by myself, but I am trying to find non-musical things to be inspired by. I find that works a little bit better for me. Of course, I have influences. You can listen to anything I do and pick out, “Oh, that sounds like this and that sounds like that…”, just like with any other musician. Having said that, I am rarely listen to something and am like, “Oh, I want to sound like that.” Of course, it comes out naturally but it’s less specific. So yes, I do find non-musical things to be more productive. It’s less of a direct line of, “He’s reading that book, therefore, it sounds like that”, or “He’s watching this so it sounds like that”, but it’s a part of the process and with that we are getting back to the very beginning of our conversation about documentaries. There’s a story, there’s characters and there’s whatever the subject matter of that film is. I try to use that as the inspiration for the music. Even if it’s not a musical inspiration, it still has some kind of a something that you can latch on to.

KAI:
… like a creative spark? I like the idea of having something that’s non-musical inspire you.

Is there something you want to do going forward in terms of your creative work? Any thoughts on looking ahead?

LEWIS:
You know, I feel like, as I was saying before, I am one of those people that just got the bug. I’m never going to stop doing it, whether it’s for work or for pleasure. When it comes to things being successful, I think in a lot of ways it’s out of my hands whether people like it or not. I just keep creating and keep creating… I guess the only thing that I could add to that would be to continue to evolve. Every year or every other year not to stick to one thing and repeatedly do that, but to keep evolving and keep pushing. Maybe you can do this a little bit differently this time, maybe you can do that a little bit differently this time… so that, at the end, the legacy would not only be all the years of work, but there would be changes too. Your life changes like that, so the music should too.

KAI:
Thank you, Lewis. It was very helpful and inspiring to hear from you and your process, in particular hearing from you about being music composer as well as film editor. Really appreciate your time. Thank you.

To find out more about Lewis and Oscillator Media you can visit his website.

Interview with Jonathan Snipes

Jonathan is a composer and sound designer for film, theatre, television and video games living in Los Angeles. He has contributed creatively to projects such as “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”, “A Glitch in the Matrix” and many others. Our conversation covered a range of topics, such as whether bird song is music or not, the role music and sound play in film as well as the frustrations and joys of collaborating with different creative disciplines and the story of a theatre set that got destroyed on tour.

KAI:
Who would you say Jonathan Snipes is and how would you describe what you do?

JONATHAN:
I’m a composer and sound designer for film, theatre, television, and video games. I’m also a musician and an educator; I teach sound design in the theatre department at UCLA in LA.

KAI:
How have you come to do all these things? Have you always had them in mind, or did you stumble across them along the way?

JONATHAN:
You know, hindsight focuses your path pretty severely and when I look back at being interested in tape recorders and sound effects as a little kid, the trajectory seems pretty clear. But I had a lot of interests as a child. When I did my undergraduate at UCLA I actually went as a playwright because I knew I wanted to work in theatre. I was also making music on my computer and I was a graphic designer, I worked at the newspaper at UCLA as a page layout designer. I had a lot of interests. Some of them fell by the wayside. I don’t really do any visual arts anymore at all. I just kind of kept doing things that were interesting to me and saying “yes” to projects until I looked around and found that I had a career.

I mean, there are paths you can follow to do all of the various things I’m doing. You can go to a music conservatory and then start at the bottom working for an existing film composer and work your way up, which I never did… Or you can start as an assistant and then an associate designer on Broadway doing theatre sound design, which I also never did. I only assisted once. I sort of took the opposite path, the freelance road of just saying “yes” to everything and doing tons of small projects for little or no money. I was able to support myself working other jobs at the university and doing late nights working on all these shows while at the same time making my own music.

The other thing is, I didn’t go to music school. My music training is pretty much all self-taught. I’m not a great player, reader, or writer of music in that way. I don’t have a lot of western conservatory / classical background. I have a lot of knowledge about classical music and I have a strong ear for things, more or less, but I just don’t have that rigor baked into me the way that some people do. I have a huge chip on my shoulder about that. Total imposter syndrome. It’s something I’m always trying to overcome… but I am trying to get better.

KAI:
Looking back, can you see if all the things you did along the way, for example the work with graphics or others, help you with what you do now? Possibly in terms of understanding other people when you are working on projects.

JONATHAN:
Sure, everything helps everything. I definitely still have a sense of how graphic design programs work. I can still open a photoshop document and know my way around, that does become handy occasionally. My wife is a very good graphic designer, so any actual creative design work in our lives happens with her, but it is definitely helpful to even know the terminology to communicate.

KAI:
The main thing you do now then is sound design for theatre and film?

JONATHAN:
Yes, sound design and music. I sort of do both at once. For the film that I have open right now I’ve done both the score and the sound design. I still do both a lot. I also make albums, mostly with my band, but I also work on other people’s albums, mixing and producing and things like that.

KAI:
What is it about music and sound that fascinates you?

JONATHAN:
That’s hard to say. I can tell you a lot of things that I like about music or sound as opposed to other disciplines. These are things that I articulate now but I certainly wouldn’t have articulated when I was choosing a path or a road. At university we had an introduction to the idea of the teleological study of music. It’s thinking about music as heading towards a specific goal. There were a lot of non-music majors there. We got to the 20th century and talked about John Cage and experimental music. This was music that was 50 or 60 years old, but people still have this absolutely visceral reaction about it not being music. There was this tape piece that Cage made from bird sounds, and it struck me. What’s really interesting about music, and I think dance has a lot in common with this, is that in most of the other disciplines, the more abstract they get, the harder they are for people to comprehend and understand. For example, as painting gets less the way we see in reality, our societal convention is, “Oh well, that’s not art anymore” The reaction to it is “that’s just a line” or “that’s just a white canvas” … that’s nonsense. Music kind of works the opposite way. Orchestral music is nothing like the sounds we hear in everyday life, it’s purely abstract. There is this total abstraction of our everyday sonic life, but we’ve developed this really rich and strong vocabulary in this abstraction which is fascinating to me. You play somebody a recording of bird sounds that they hear in their reality, and they say, “well that’s not music”, but then you play them Peter and the Wolf with a flute imitating a bird and “there, that’s music”. That’s interesting, this sort of reversal of the way people perceive music. Making sound art, especially as a way of making incredibly naturalistic sort of unadventurous and concrete work that is regarded as an avant-garde or experiment, that’s interesting to me.

KAI:
In terms of your creative process, do you simply get ideas as you go about your day, or do you need a set brief to focus? What gets your creative juices flowing?

JONATHAN:
Oh gosh, it’s so hard and it’s different from project to project. I mean the simple answer is deadlines. I read a quote by a writer that was something like, “I only write when inspiration strikes me. Fortunately, it strikes from 9 am to noon every day”, something like that. It’s about this sort of rigorous discipline of writing, which I don’t have at all. I’ve never had that and I’m incredibly envious of that. Most of my time is spent working on projects that I am not the sole author of and I have deadlines. There is also a lot to respond to from the plays or movies that I’m working on, so I’m doing very little anymore that I am the sole creative germinating seed of. I’m always responding to something or working with someone.

KAI:
In my case, it does help me to know what the music or the sound design are for. For me, it channels creative energy towards that goal. I find it difficult to simply look at a blank sheet of paper.

JONATHAN:
Yes, definitely. Was it Ennio Morricone who said that as long as he’s writing film music he’ll never run out of ideas because there is always picture to respond to? There’s always a question and he has to provide an answer, or another question in response to that question… there’s always something. If you look at a piece of film, there’s a million different possible responses to it. You can kind of just go down the list and things work or don’t work. It is a never-ending fountain of inspiration but then the focus gets narrower and narrower.

KAI:
We have already been talking about music and film. In one sense this question sounds obvious, but it has been really interesting to talk to different people about it. When you combine music, sound and film, how would you describe what happens?

JONATHAN:
It’s funny, I was just reading Michel Chion the other day. He was talking about the empathetic and asynchronous responses. I mean that’s a really deep question. Music and sound are so compartmentalised in film and theatre. Where do you draw the line between the two? When I’m working, I’m doing both. I mean to me John Cage’s piece of bird sounds on tape is music. I also think Pierre Schaeffer is music. If you take that and put it on a film, are you still a composer or are you a sound designer all of a sudden? Where is that line? I think that’s really interesting and really interesting to play with.

There is an interview with Jad Abumrad that I really like. He is the creator of Radiolab on NPR. He talks about film music as being the character in the movie that knows the most about what’s going on. Music as this sort of omniscient wind that operates on its own. Great film music is there not to tell you what to feel exactly, but to show you when something is important, when to pay attention, when a character has learned something or when something has changed about the world. I think of that as keeping a balloon in the air energy wise. It sits in that kind of balance. I think good sound design can do that too. It’s never so simple as to say, “this character is sad, so I’m going to play sad music…” It’s more that the character has learned something and we want the audience to notice that and to think of their own emotional connections to what that character might have learned and how they would interpret that and things like that. Sometimes that’s very easy to do, and other times it’s incredibly hard. In some cases it’s one drone that comes in at the right moment and makes everyone cry. At other times it’s this really complex sort of rich harmonic thing that you have to come up with.

KAI:
I find it quite interesting to think about different creative practices. You mentioned theatre, film, sound design and music. In collaborating with different ones of those have you found challenges in communication? Say for example, talking to someone from a theatre background who doesn’t understand your terminology?

JONATHAN:
Yeah, I mean that’s mostly what the job is. You develop the craft of being able to make the things that you want to make and then the job almost entirely becomes communication with people who don’t share the same language with you, because we don’t really have a shared common communal language about sound. Music is a little easier, honestly. The thing that I run into time and time again which is incredibly frustrating, maybe you will relate to this, is people who think they have a really strong grasp on musical terminology. They then use these very specific words that are simply wrong and you have to figure out what they mean.

I had a director who commented on a cue saying, “Oh, cheeky move to go to the seven chord there” and it’s like, “It’s not the seven chord and it’s not a seventh there’s no…” – what do you mean? I’m going to revise a cue for another movie later on today where the director said, “Hey, let’s replace this instrument with a solo piano”, and it is a solo piano already… So, I’m like “Okay… what is it about the sound that I’m using that makes you think it’s not a piano?” It’s also phrases like, “I love it when the Violin comes in here” … and it’s a Cello. It’s all that kind of stuff. I mean, they’re not wrong. They have an opinion and they feel a certain way about it. Ultimately, it’s their movie and their project. What do they mean that I am not getting credit for? The notes that are the hardest for me are when I send a cue to somebody and they say, “Oh, this is cool, but can it do…” the thing that I think the cue is doing… I had a director say, “Hey, it’d be really cool to have some brass instruments in this score. I really love this counterpoint brass writing in this thing…” and he sent me a track that had these three-part block chords of whole notes on bass clarinet, clarinet, and tenor sax. I thought, “It’s not brass instruments… it’s not counterpoint writing… so what do you actually want?”

KAI:
Isn’t that back and forth frustrating sometimes?

JONATHAN:
It’s only frustrating when you don’t know where you’re going, when you feel like you’re treading water and you don’t understand the goal. It’s really exciting when I feel like I’m on the same page with somebody and I’m suggesting as many changes and revisions as they are. Then it gets really exciting. It’s actually more work, time and effort, but it’s effort that feels like you’re moving towards something and you’re sharing a common goal. That’s pretty rare in my experience. Usually, you’re slogging through notes you don’t understand and the cue feels like it’s getting noted to death… notes that you don’t understand but you’re trying to implement anyway… and then you end up with something feels like it’s lost its spine a little bit. But sometimes you go through that process and suddenly a light bulb flips and it’s like, “Oh, I get what you’ve been going for this whole time and now it’s better.”

KAI:
Great!

JONATHAN:
I’m not going to pretend that my first draft of anything is the best version of it, that’s usually not the case; but there are a lot of cues in my projects where it feels like we’ve gone down a road where neither of us has quite seen eye to eye and we’re just changing things for the sake of changing things and it’s just gotten confused… that’s super frustrating. Good feedback with a with a clear intent that is actionable is great. The best notes are the notes where you think, “Oh, of course. I wish I’d thought of that.”

KAI:
Has there been a project you particularly enjoyed working on?

JONATHAN:
Yes, so many. I really love almost everything I work on at this point. I’m lucky that I actually don’t really say “no” to too much stuff still, but I’ve been really blessed with incredible collaborators and great projects. I did a movie last year called A Glitch in the Matrix (2021) with Rodney Ascher. He is a really good collaborator and we’ve done a lot of movies together. We have a very clear collaboration and he’s very trusting, which is really nice. If I do something that he doesn’t like or understand, he will let me explore it. With Rodney there is this back and forth of notes where it gets exciting. I will, at a certain point, start throwing out cues and rewriting them from scratch that he likes and doesn’t have any notes on. I’ll say, “Oh, I know what this should be, I have a better idea.” That’s really fun. That’s not to say that he’s wrong. He will hear something and be like, “Oh, I get it. Maybe this other cue should sort of echo that”, and I can see that it is a great idea. We are then off to the races in that way and A Glitch in the Matrix (2021) is definitely our most complex collaboration. There is a lot going on in all the different departments across the board. It was a step-up in terms of production and quality, as well as ambition.

Another project that I worked on was a staged adaptation of Joan Didion’s essay The White Album (1979). That was probably the most ambitious and exciting theatre production for me. It was an incredibly difficult and challenging project in all the right way with the strongest and best creative team. Lifelong family was formed on that production. It toured a lot, but it will unfortunately never happen again. Mostly because… well, the set got destroyed. We toured it in Australia in January of 2020 and on the trip back it got destroyed. The set was something like a big plexiglass box on stage. There were two audiences for the show. The main audience looking at the stage, and then an audience of about 20 to 30 young people in the box, wearing headphones and receiving instructions; they were experiencing a totally different show.

KAI:
You mentioned challenges. What were your challenges with that project?

JONATHAN:
Well, to have two concurrently running shows is pretty hard, right?! A speaker show and a headphone show. The speakers had to move focus in and out of the box all the time. Everyone had a mic and so moment to moment we had to check, “What do people hear in their headphones? Do they hear live mics?” There were also whole pieces of music that I wrote that only people with the headphones heard. At a particular moment the people on stage were dancing to a piece of music that the audience outside didn’t hear. I then had to slow that down gradually and turn it into all of them clapping along to a kind of protest chant that rose from it, which the outside audience did here. All of that had to be timed with texts that were spoken which only the outside audience could hear… so a lot of really cool technical stuff. Show control programming to get all the systems to talk to each other… so much really complex synchronization between lights and sound.

KAI:
Are you usually working on different projects at the same time? How have you developed skills in making sure you know you do the best you can on each?

JONATHAN:
(Laughing) Oh, that’s the worst… partly because I like all the projects I’m working on so much. If you’re on a bunch of projects simultaneously you can feel like you’re doing a bad job on all of them, but you don’t want to because you like them all. I have not figured a healthy work / life balance out. I am hopefully transitioning to a point of my life where I can simply trust the skills I have developed a little bit more so that I’m not constantly second guessing the things that I’m making. That takes up a lot of time. If I could just relax, drop it, make something, not judge it, and then have something on the other side that I thought was okay, things would go a lot faster. My wife and I are about to have our first child. I’m very interested but also terrified to see how that’s going to affect that feeling. I work with a lot of people who have kids. I find myself working on these project with them and I’m so stressed out but it feels like they’re doing the same amount of work that I am, except they’re not stressed at all. I’ve always thought, “Oh, right… and you’re also in charge of a human life, like that’s… This movie that I’m stressing out about actually feels pretty low stakes compared to the health, happiness and well-being of a human child!” I was talking to the director of the play I just finished, which is running now. She has two kids and said, “Oh, it makes it so much easier to work. Yes, it is hard to have a kid, it’s hard to find the time and you’re tired all the time, but in terms of the actual making of the work, you realize how low stakes it is and you can relax and make better work.”

KAI:
It sounds like it helped her focus.

JONATHAN:
I think so. Rodney said the same thing. His child was born just before I met him, I think. We made our first movie together around 2011. Basically, his career really blossomed right after he had his child, which is interesting to think about too. Rodney said that having a kid made him so much more productive because it compartmentalised his time in a particular way. Work time became really precious and so he got a lot done during it. But work was also suddenly not the most important thing in his life anymore. Of course I am super excited to have a child and help deal with someone’s taste and experience of the world is going to be so much fun, but I’m also looking forward to what it means for the next phase in my work.

KAI:
Is there something particular in terms of work that you would love to do going forward?

JONATHAN:
Yeah, I mean I would love to make a solo record and get back into making music. I also have a pretty strong field recording practice and I would love it to be stronger. It’s actually such a good excuse to leave this room and get into nature. I do feel so much healthier and happier when I’m doing more of that. I have a camping trip coming up to an island off the coast of California here and I’m so looking forward to it. I need to be doing more of that. The goal is always fewer projects for more money so that you feel like you can do a better job and you feel a little bit more supported and secure. I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen for me at this point. I have to just be excited by the things that I get, and I am grateful for all the work. Defining success is really interesting. How do you do that?

Around the time I turned 30 I had my first big reckoning in life. I thought, “Oh, I’m not really just starting anymore. I’ve been doing this for a while… what is it that I’m doing?” I was doing a band at that time called Captain Ahab. It was the thing I had in my life that really felt like a solo project. I was writing lyrics, and everything was sort of coming from me in a way that nothing I’ve done since then quite has. But I thought, “If I’m doing this to make money I should probably quit and do something else, because there are better ways to make money. If I’m doing this to get famous, I should probably quit and do something else, because there are better ways to get famous. If I’m doing this to meet people, it’s working.” I have so many dear and close friends across the world that I only met by touring the Captain Ahab project. The best reason to be in a weird DIY band and book your own tours is just the incredible people you meet and the connections you form; they are just really important lifelong ones. The only thing I really guarantee myself out of pursuing this work is that I actually get to do the work. I get to make music. That’s what I can guarantee myself. If that’s not enough I should do something else… and I sort of decided that has to be enough.

And now, 10 or 11 years after I’m having the same sort of reckoning. I mean, the clipping. project has blown up in a way that I didn’t expect. We still don’t make any money from it, I couldn’t just be in that band full time, but I get to score movies that I really like, I get to work on plays that I really like, and I get to make music with two of my absolute best friends on a reasonable record label with support and we can do whatever we want. It’s hard for me to complain. You know, sure I would love to make more money and not be terrified about it but who is to say that I wouldn’t just buy more synthesizers and… (laughing)

KAI:
… and do more work (laughing)…

JONATHAN
Yeah, so I don’t know.

It’s interesting too, because I always used to say that I didn’t like making music, but I liked having made music. I didn’t really love the process. The process is really hard, and it still is but I was really proud of having things afterwards. That’s not really sustainable though. My goal now is to find a find a way to love the process again. Sometimes I do, other times I don’t and then of course deadlines are deadlines… you have to push through.

KAI:
Enjoying the process as well as the finished work at the end sounds good. Thanks so much for your time, Jonathan. It was great to hear about you work but also from you more personally.

Thanks for sharing!

You can find more from Jonathan on his website.

BA Graduation with Music Prize

I am very grateful to have been awarded a 1st class Bachelor of Arts in Music with Honours by the University of Sussex. I am also very thankful that the hard work has been recognised with a prize for outstanding achievement in Music in 2022.

Heartfelt appreciation goes to all those who have supported me along the way, particularly family and friends. I would also like to express my gratitude towards all my tutors who have not only been informative but inspirational as well. They always had a listening ear, opened up new ways of thinking about music for me and helped develop my craft. Above all, I am thankful for God’s grace, which has been a vital source of strength, particularly when demands felt most intense.

To see some of my coursework from my time at university you can browse through the updates on this website or explore the projects section. More will be released throughout the coming year.

Course Content

Year 1

Introduction to Music Studies

Approaches to Composition & Performance

Instrumentation, Voicing & Orchestration

Making Music Theatre

Music & Society

Popular Music Cultures

History & Practice of Electronic Music

Music Production

Year 2

The Idea of Classical Music

The History of the Modern

Case Studies in 19th & 20th Century Composition

History and Practice of Songwriting

From Opera to Film

Film Music Beyond Hollywood

Sound Design in Context

Electronic Music & Performance

Year 3

Advanced Composition & Arrangement

Music Dissertation

Film Music & Audiovisual Project

Music Project

Interview with Michael A. Levine

From the streets on St. Paddy’s Day to Hans Zimmer conducting one of his arrangements at the Hollywood Bowl and from advertising jingles to blockbuster hits… As composer for film and television Michael has been involved in numerous projects, such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Batman: The Dark Knight, Rango, Dunkirk, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Assassin’s Creed: Unity, the recent Netflix hit The Lost Pirate Kingdom and many more… In our conversation we spoke about his personal journey with music and film, the changes and developments he sees in orchestral music and the power of collaboration. After 50 plus years of work he still has 100 things he wants to do!

KAI:
Hi Michael, thank you for your time. It’s great to talk to you! As an introduction, how would you describe who you are and what you do?

MICHAEL:
(Laughing)… 50 plus years of work, there’s some depth there… Look, I started out as a songwriter and as a rock and roll guy who also played the violin in orchestras. So, I’ve always been what I describe as a pathological eclecticist.

I made a living in a whole variety of ways as a youth. I was playing Irish music at St. Paddy’s Day, had an original band… and you know we thought we were going to be famous. Eventually I started writing music for advertising and discovered I really liked it and did that for many years but at a certain point I kind of got bored with the process. The business was changing and I just felt I wanted a bigger canvas. I moved out to LA to write music for films.

Through a series of ridiculous strokes of luck I ended up working with Hans Zimmer. Great education for me! To this day I continue to write music for both my own projects and occasionally for others, including for Hans when he calls me, but I have also become very interested in screenwriting. Before I thought I would be a professional musician I wanted to be a playwright and it seems that I have come full circle with that in some ways. I wrote a short film that’s been making the festival rounds and has won several awards. I’ve also written a bunch of other scripts; let’s see if it leads to anything. I am fortunately at a point in my life where I can take those kinds of risks without losing the roof over my head. Not everyone can do that. I mean certainly when I think about my 20s… I was playing music on the street because I had to.

KAI:
What fascinates you about music? What triggers your interest?

MICHAEL:
I am fascinated by how humans are this great contradiction. We are these rugged, devout individualists who desperately want to connect with each other, and music is one of those things that does both. You get to express yourself as well as connect with others at the same time. It’s a different kind of language. I mean language is a beautiful invention as well, but music, dance, the visual arts… all these things are part of what makes us human.

KAI:
How would you describe what happens when you combine visual art, music, sound, dance… that fusion of creative practices coming together?

MICHAEL:
Well, each one is communicating in a different language. I once asked Hans, “How would you define the job of a composer?” It’s one of those stupid open-ended questions. He thought for a second and said, “To think of the things that the director didn’t think of.” Yes, a good film score communicates something that can’t be communicated in any other way. Every one of those disciplines supports the other but also says something unique. That’s why you’ve got a billion names listed on the credits. Every one of those people does something important.

One of my favourite quotes on this is from the book In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch. It’s a small little book. He’s an editor and sound designer. He wears a couple of different hats. Walter is the guy who came up with the wumph wumph… the helicopter sound in Apocalypse Now fifty odd years ago. But he’s primarily an editor. He described the process of making a film saying, “It’s very similar to building a cathedral”, which I thought was a wonderful metaphor because it takes a long time with a lot of people and it’s very expensive and it never quite turns out the way anybody envisioned it. Every one of those people contributes something to it and you end up with something that is uniquely beautiful – but it is the combination of all these different people’s contribution. Film is a great medium in that way. You’ve got music, dialogue, acting, cinematography, editing and directing… and each one of these contributes to the art form.

KAI:
I am very interested in how orchestral music has changed over time and how it might be changing now. What are your thoughts on that? Maybe particularly with involving electronics?

MICHAEL:
You know, there have been experiments with integrating acoustic and electronic instruments for 60 or 70 years. I mean if you include the Ondes Martenot and the Theremin then it’s 100 years. That’s not a new idea. I think the idea that there is a set orchestra is kind of an illusion. The design of instruments in 1750 was different to what is was in 1800 and that design was different again instruments in 1850. What are standard instruments in an orchestra changed too…

Now, an odd thing happened. Orchestral music developed this large repertoire and became the music of the well-off. But in the early parts of the 20th century truck drivers would go (or lorry drivers, excuse me) (laughing) – they would go to see an orchestra play. The emphasis was more or less on contemporary music. But for a variety of reasons that have to do with shifts, and partly due to the rise of the recorded technology, popular music developed this great economic strain and so they diverged in a way that really wasn’t the case beforehand. I mean, not to say that there wasn’t the fiddle player at the local pub versus the guy who played in an orchestra in 1850, but the idea that something is ‘real music’ and something ‘for all you kids’ didn’t really exist until about the 20th century for technological reasons.

I think that there is a growing awareness in the classical world to either beam up or become irrelevant. It’s not to say you’re not going to preserve all this beautiful legacy. I mean, Hildegard von Bingen is now suddenly hot on YouTube! I mean… who thought! These things go in waves, but in the history of classical music there’s always been this adaptation of the new-fangled. Tchaikovsky said, “Oh, what’s that? You call that a Celesta? Okay cool, let’s use that!” Or think of the introduction of the saxophone and other instruments. The piano forte is another example, I mean Bach didn’t have one. And then you have Glenn Gould 200 years later and people think that’s what it was written for because he was so good at it. I think that there’s a kind of collective amnesia sometimes on how fluid things have always been and they will continue to be fluid. And the definition of what an orchestra is is going to keep changing.

KAI:
Do you think that will increasingly include electronic elements in live performances going forward?

MICHAEL:
I suspect so. I mean electronics in my youth implied a certain kind of disconnection from the acoustic world, but I think as the technology advances you’re going to start seeing things that are much more invisible. Somebody will come out with what looks like an acoustic guitar but it’s actually electronically amplified and you won’t have some cable running over to some big stack of something. The changes in technology have always affected music and they will continue to do so; eventually they get integrated and they do so always in a way that no one expected.

KAI:
Do you think there’s a danger though, for say very traditional orchestras, in simply preserving their traditional repertoire and the way they do things? Did you use the word “irrelevance” earlier on or did I stumble over it in my wider research?

MICHAEL:
“Irrelevance” is not quite right. The baroque orchestras, for example, which only play Baroque music do a wonderful job. They use the authentic instruments and have strings that don’t stay in tune and so on. And you know, that’s great! It’s just like jazz bands that exclusively play Charlie Parker tunes. Great! These are parts of history and we appreciate history. Sometimes what’s old is new again – I mentioned Hildegard von Bingen. These things go in and out of fashion and some of the old is fashionable now.

I think that there are practical things that are going to make it difficult to do, say, Wagnerian orchestras, simply because of the fact that it is expensive. So, if that’s all you do… I imagine the big festival is going to stay with us for another hundred years or more, but the idea of that being considered norm is probably not going to be the case. I mean, this is my prediction; but the one thing history has shown is that anybody who predicted anything eventually was embarrassed.

KAI:
Let’s see what happens! On a slightly different note, thinking about collaboration across creative practices… How important do you think it is for a composer not to do everything by himself but to draw on a team with different perspectives, insights, and skills to work together?

MICHAEL:
If you see the movie The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) you would believe Charlton Heston, who’s playing Michelangelo, painted the entire Sistine Chapel by himself. That’s historically inaccurate. He had a team of, I read, 13 assistants who helped him. Look, it’s his vision, he definitely deserves the credit. He was a genius but physiologically you can’t be everywhere at once, especially when you’re at Sistine Chapel.

Hans has received a lot of criticism because he is one of the few people who is very open about his process in terms of doing blockbuster films. Films that don’t require that degree of labour can still be done by one person, but even back in the ‘golden age of filmmaking’, let’s say in the 1930s or so… okay somebody sat there and wrote it out with a pen on a piece of paper, but there was still a copyist, a recording engineer and others. I mean there was still a team of people who made it happen and honestly, even in those days there were orchestrators because the workload was too heavy for one person. So I think there is a romantic illusion of the sole artist; and it’s not just true in films. This is true in a lot of arts.

KAI:
Was there a specific point on your journey where someone or something inspired you? What got you on this track of writing music and doing what you do today?

MICHAEL:
I always felt more comfortable writing music than being a performer per se. For one thing, I can fix my mistakes! And I make a plenty of them… There was a period in the mid 80s where I was a session keyboard player, which was kind of hilarious because I’m not that good of a keyboard player, but I was good with the electronics. I could sample things and get good synth sounds, so I got hired a lot.

I went to all the jingle houses and tried to get work as a jingle writer, but none of them would even listen to my reel. The reel was inappropriate anyway, it consisted of all these weird art pieces… so, I went to the agencies themselves to pitch my music but got nowhere. I remember one guy. While he was basically ushering me out, he said, “Your stuff does not sound like jingles”. I somehow had the presence of mind to say to him, “Do you know anybody who might like what I do?” “Call Michael… he likes weird stuff.” So, I called him and said, “I was told I should give you a call because you might like what I do.” And he did like it and got me my first real jingle. I was the guy they would call when they wanted something weird.

It was a period of rapid transformation as they were going from a very traditional method of production to a more electronic one. I was comfortable in both worlds which most people weren’t. You either had the knob twiddlers or you had the note readers. I was not a good note reader, but I was comfortable with it. I did play the violin in orchestras… and I understood score, but it still was not my forte.

KAI:
So, at this point in your career, are there specific things that you would still like to do? You mentioned screenwriting earlier.

MICHAEL:
About 100 things! In the musical area I did an album a few years ago with Evelyn Glennie, the great percussionist. I really want to do a duo concerto with her and a cellist or violinist. I’d love to do a duo concerto for her. I love writing pieces for unusual instruments. I think I wrote the world’s only piece for pedal steel guitar and orchestra. So, you know, I’d love to do more… and that’s just in the musical area.

In terms of the writing, I’ve got about a dozen screenplays for films and ideas for TV shows and so on. The problem is, you know, I’m racing against time… I’m really trying to get it all done but it will never all be done, let’s be real. But I still feel like this is the fun stuff. I mean this is why you become an artist – to create things. And as I said, I’ve been fortunate enough that I can afford to take some chances that I couldn’t take when I was young. Let’s see if anybody likes it.

To explore Michael’s portfolio, visit his website.