Posts tagged: Old
It’s been a busy few weeks, so pardon me while I screw my head back on and regroup a bit here.
The GCFC Match-Up went exceedingly well — beyond even my wildest expectations. Working with a real orchestra, and a talented one, is an unimaginable treat, and I have to give a special thanks to Darren Fung and Victor Davies from the GCFC and Dennis Patterson from the Glenn Gould Recording Studio at the CBC Headquarters for being so supportive, helpful, and encouraging throughout the process. I could go into wild details about the proceedings and the process of scoring the film, but I’ve already done that here, so take a look if you’re interested.
Since the match-up, I’ve been keeping busy with a healthy combination of schoolwork and musical experimentation. I was recently called up to do a spec track for a company that may or may not end up engaging my services down the road, and since I hate to update without having some music to share, I offer you all a chance to take a listen:
The track has also gone up on my demo reel if you prefer checking it out there. Speaking of which — and I know I’ve already gushed about this on Twitter — I already have over 1000 plays on SoundCloud since switching the demo reel over to it! All I can say is that I’m honoured and humbled that so many people are listening to my work; I truly hope you’re enjoying it! If you are, remember to follow me on Twitter so you can keep up to date with fresh news…I update that a lot more frequently than this Journal, I’m ashamed to admit.
Okay okay, I’ll get to the “pleasant honking” bit. I don’t have a new technique for surreptitious molesting. I’m sorry. I do, however, have a new instrument that I’m thrilled to be playing! I recently inherited a clarinet (his name is Melvin, it says so on his case — Melvin the Magnificent, to be precise) and have been thoroughly enjoying the process of trying to learn to make passable sounds on him without any formal instruction.
Incidentally, I’m not schizophrenic.
I am proud to report that I was (fairly inconsistently) making proper clarinet noises after about half an hour, and now, several days on, I can play some pretty respectable little riffs. My bigger interest lies in the variety of wild and unusual sounds I can get out of the instrument though, which thus far has yielded some, uh, interesting sample recordings. Turns out Melvin does a pretty good Duduk impression.
Anyhow, back to work. Thanks for checking in! :)
How are those New Years resolutions holding up, people?
I don’t make any, so I can’t offer you my own answer, but I can say that this has already been a year of new beginnings for me — and it’s only been half a month! After a 5 year pause, I’ve finally taken up my Kung Fu training again which is making me feel very good and physically refreshed. I did 7 years leading up into my highschool years and then the studio closed, so I’ve been waiting ever since to find a new place that I like…I think this one is it.
In musical news, I’ve been gifted with a marvelous opportunity by the wonderful GCFC (Guild of Canadian Film Composers). They’ve set up a partnership program between them and the CFC wherein a number of applicants (composers) are paired up with emerging directors from the CFC (Canadian Film Centre) every year to score a small exercise and have it performed and recorded with a live orchestra! This year, I was among the 4 chosen from across Canada to participate, and am absolutely thrilled to be working on a wonderful and dramatic segment of film. I had my spotting session with the director yesterday afternoon and have promptly buried my nose in the footage to begin immersing myself in it. I figured that I should let the world know though before hiding away in the studio again…so here’s me sharing what is truly an amazing opportunity for which I am very grateful to the GCFC.
I cannot actually show the video, but once the score is written and recorded, you can bet that the audio will be up on my demo reel for your listening enjoyment. Expect something minimalistic and challenging…the film is pretty intense stuff!
Another interesting development is that I am mourning the loss of my old phone. The wonderful Samsung E747F that served me so well for two years has finally keeled over and died — after a prolonged period of erratic behaviour, decreasing battery life, and other strange manifestations of senility. Indulgence is a good cure for grief, and so I indulged…which is to say that I’m now the happy owner of an iPhone. Actually, I had to leave my old service provider and switch to a new one just to be able to get it without paying an arm and my firstborn child (long story short: apparently service loyalty is not as valuable as I expected…). In any case, I have been enjoying the myriad bounties of the App Store and the fun and friendly interface of the phone. If you were planning on getting in touch but didn’t up until now, please reconsider — give me a call! I’m always happy to hear from people and it’s an excuse to use all the free minutes I get this month with the new phone.
…But I will never forget you, dear Samsung.
Also: my review of Brothers, by Thomas Newman, went up on Tracksounds so you are welcome to check it out. If you’re interested in my views on more scores, make sure to look back in the archives too, there’ve been a bunch of other reviews that I didn’t post about here.
Anyhow, it’s back to the manuscript for me — I’ll check in soon!
It snowed the other day. I was half expecting this to be another soggy and ugly winter, but it seems that we may yet get a picturesque and cold — an honest and proper — winter, which I’m happy about even though I’m not a huge fan of cold weather.
The Time Traveler premiere was a lot of fun, and the private screening before it went to air was neat too….it’s interesting to meet the actors in person after one has been staring at them on a screen for so many hours. Turns out they actually exist! With TTT finished for now, I’m happily on the lookout for new and interesting projects to work on, and that will hopefully mean some more time for me to do site updates as well now that the wonderful holidays are here and I have some free time (theoretically) to kill.
I’ve been doing pretty frequent SoundCast discussions over at www.tracksounds.com, so you may want to check those out. It’s a great podcast and we discuss many topical issues that would concern fans of film and game scores. Plus, there are always neat contests going on where you can win free scores, and that’s always a good thing.
If something looks different, it’s because I’ve added a live chat function to the site (look up to your right) that you can use to chat with me if I’m around the studio when you’re browsing the site. It’s a neat feature and along with it I’ll also be putting up a new track or two on the Demo Reel, so make sure to take a listen. This is the holiday season though, and in the spirit of…er…madness, I guess, I’ve created a piece that brings together the joys of kazoos, a choir on helium, and a healthy does of my inner Danny Elfman. Enjoy responsibly:
That’s all for now, happy holidays!
After a long and tedious weekend of preparing stems and other such things, I can proudly say that the Time Traveler score is completed! Very exciting to see it all come together and I can’t wait to be able to share some excerpts. For now though, there’s other interesting news on the horizon…
Besides some exciting new projects coming up in the musical world, I also have some fairly significant website tweaks planned, so expect to see those popping up in the fairly-near future. Among them is a live resume (courtesy of the wonderful iPaper plugin from Scribd), which has already made its way to the main navigation menu up there. Unfortunately, the default zoom level can’t be changed for the plugin, so I can’t make it so that you don’t need to scroll to see the whole resume, but it’s a small price to pay for the coolness of having it up and available. I’m hoping to add a link to my business card underneath as well. There’s more coming besides that though, including some cosmetic facelifts (better typography, I choose you!), the long-lost video section of the portfolio, and a pretty big expansion of networking connections and links to all my myriad profiles all over the internet so that people can get and stay in touch with me more conveniently.
To celebrate the completion of the Time Traveler score, I decided that some serious percussion was in order, and so late last night I threw together this little percussive thingy and gave it a title that I feel does an excellent job of encompassing my mindset at that ungodly hour:
Bam bam! Alright, enough of that. I’m off to continue my recent venture into the amazingly complex world of deep synthesis fun, so until next time, adieu, and keep on the lookout for more random site updates as time wears on!
It’s been a fairly crazy few months in Marius land, hence the lack of updates, but I can’t leave everyone in the dark forever so here’s an idea of what I’ve been up to…
Remember that TV gig? Well, I am working hard on scoring the pilot episode as we speak. The Time Traveler (www.thetimetraveler.tv) will hit the broadcast waves sometime later this fall if all goes according to schedule. I can’t show off any music from it for now, but I’m enjoying the process and exploring some new avenues of sound design and instrument manipulation to get the unusual, ethereal, and haunting soundscape just right. Expect more news about this as time goes on.
In other news, I’m now the proud owner of Andrew Keresztes’s fabulous new sampled string library, LASS (www.audiobro.com). I cannot express my love of this library enough, it makes writing for sampled strings a completely different experience. Of course, I also had to do some serious RAM augmenting to my setup to be able to make proper use of it, but it was completely and utterly worth it. For the sake of example, here’s a recent piece put together in an afternoon with my newly revised and expanded orchestral template — including the wonderful LASS library:
I’ve got some new reviews up on tracksounds.com as well, with more on the way. I even got to interview Theodore Shapiro about Year One, which was great. Speaking of talking to composers, my girlfriend and I just recently got back from a quick, one-week, pre-schoolyear sojourn to sunny California where, among other things, I got to meet Christopher Lennertz and chill out with him and Tim Wynn for a bit at their studio. SonicFuel is a great place, and you’d be hard-pressed to find friendlier or more welcoming and generous people. I have pictures to prove it too!
Time to get back to writing, but I promise to be more regular and random with my news postings. See you all soon!
Excitement!
And lots to show as well. Before I get into showing some recent work though, I should mention that the iPhone game project I mentioned vaguely last time is indeed underway and I’m very much enjoying working on the music — it’s similar to Spitfire’s, except more developed since I have more tracks to spread the material over. In addition, I’m pursuing a potential television pilot scoring opportunity that I’m excited about. Interview tomorrow. Apprehension today. Hopefully I will return with good news.
Visitors to my portfolio page will have noticed a project in there called The Moonlight Path. I’ve been involved with this mod of Neverwinter Nights 2 for some years now. As a mod, progress is slow, and the music that I had originally written for it no longer stands up to my current standards and so I have been slowly re-working or, more accurately, re-writing all the pieces from scratch to bring them up to my new quality standards of writing and production.
Among them has been the main title theme, which is what I’m sharing today. This theme (in its original form) is one of the first real things I ever wrote for a game, which gives it a lot of nostalgic value for me. I had a lot of fun revisiting it after so much time and breathing some new life into it. This time around, I approached it a bit more tastefully than in the original (I feel) and it’s resulted in a more well-rounded presentation of the material.
As a title theme, it doesn’t do a whole lot in the way of actually developing the thematic material too far, but this is intentional — I’m just presenting it here. The rest of the score’s job is to visit new themes and develop these ones at length.
It’s a really large ensemble, which presented some mixing challenges, but I’m very happy with the result and so is the developer. I’m hoping you guys will like it too:
The other neat little project I worked on recently was an animation for a colleague’s final university project. The clip itself tells the story of a Chinese warrior whose soul is summoned to the afterlife, but he decides he’d much rather see his girlfriend one last time — it’s quite cute. Tim Mehmet, the creator, did a really good job with the animation; I had fun scoring it and I wish him the best of luck as he pursues his game art degree. You can check out the video here, and eventually on my ever-elusive video portfolio page…
That’s all for now: composing calls!
Hi guys,
Sorry for the site downtime over the past day and a half. My host had some issues with the server and I had to wait to be able to get it up and running again. Everything should be back and alive again now though. Still no video samples to show in the portfolio, I’m afraid, but in the meantime I wanted to share a fresh piece of music that I wrote for the demo reel the other night. You can listen below and subsequently look for the piece on the Demo Reel page of the portfolio as well:
In other news, I’m looking forward to a potential iPhone game project which should be very fun. More significantly though, I’ve been featured on the latest podcast episode over at Tracksounds.com (Look HERE)! Just a quick note about the episode, the track, “Spitfire Gameplay”, that you hear is actually not from Crysis: The Lost World Returns. It’s from an independent game project called Spitfire which was an arcade military game I scored earlier in the year. In any case, a big thanks to Chris (the Tracksounds Guru) for the exposure!
Also on the Tracksounds front, I’m happy to report that I’m going to be officially contributing to the site with reviews and possibly more as time goes on, so expect my name to turn up around there more often in the future. It’s a wonderful opportunity.
That’s all for now, but keep an eye out for video clips (I hope) with the next entry!
So you know how every online journal author in the world is visited by the regular updates fairy? Yeah, I think mine had a run in with a jetliner on the way over or something.
Excuses aside though, the reason for my silence has, ironically, been largely caused by a profusion of new noise — music! — that I’ve been working on. In my last update, I mentioned that I was preparing to venture into some jazzy territory with a fellow composer’s jazz ensemble, and that came to pass. I acted as recording engineer for their first studio session and it was an absolute blast. There’s something incredibly cool about the organic texture of quasi-improvised large-ensemble jazz music.
After that, I had a brief sojourn into the world of music for advertising, which is fun. I’m hoping that I can attract more clients in that area, especially in the film trailer scene…terribly fun music to write. My most important development though is the completion of a new score for a film called Astrid.
Earlier in the year, I was contacted by an independent director looking to reserve my services for her film project a few months down the road. I agreed and in the time between the last post and this one, the film was completed, I received the footage, and created just about 20 minutes of music for the film…which is actually about its entire length. Astrid is an interesting fantasy-esque live action film and features no dialogue at all, which was both exciting and a great responsibility because it meant that my music had to convey the bulk of the sonic facet of the film and be consistent with the moods and imagery. Needless to say, I enjoyed the hell out of the work and I’m quite pleased with the result. I hope to be able to put up a sample in the portfolio ASAP.
Speaking of which, interested visitors may have noticed a continuing lack of updates to the site’s infrastructure. This is largely due to the interesting creature called “university” which eats the time of my webmaster and myself. Nevertheless, updates will start arriving soon enough (I hope) since the year is winding down. I myself am now completely finished, having written my last exam today, and I look forward to having more music-writing time as the summer approaches…
Jazz is fun.
I have discovered this mainly through the listening suggestions of another composer friend of mine, Robin Jessome, whose work with his jazz ensemble Blunt Object I highly encourage everyone to check out. It’s wild. It’s also inspired me to try my hand at some jazz too…if you’re interested in hearing my own entertaining pastiche on the genre, you’ll find a fresh track entitled “Restless” in the Demo Reel section of the Portfolio (or just below, if you’re lazy). I warn you in advance: it contains some unbelievably cheesy scat vocals which may cause involuntary head-shaking and or laughter:
I read a very interesting article the other day which I thought I should mention. Apparently, a team from Northwestern University have found some biological evidence to prove that musicians’ brains are more adept at picking up emotional content in sounds — musical or, in this case, speech. When you sit and think about it, I suppose it makes a lot of sense, since musicians tend to train themselves to identify precise variations in pitch and timbre and so on, but I hadn’t actually thought about the significance that training might have on applications outside of music. Anyway, I won’t paraphrase the whole article, but suffice it to say that I was intrigued and I think it’s well worth looking over for those who are musically inclined: http://www.physorg.com/news155309993.html.
I am happy to report that I have a number of awesome projects coming up, one of which actually involves the Blunt Object ensemble I mentioned above. All very exciting. I will also say that I hope to continue coaxing my website frogs to polish up the remaining missing elements of the site — the video section of the Portfolio page, the stylesheet for this Journal, etc.
It’s coming, not to worry. In the meantime, take a listen to my foray into the jazz world, subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already, check out that article, and please send me chocolates. Anything but mint or fruit. Nuts are fine.
…What? It’s worth a shot.
Flu = 1, Marius = 2
It was a bit of a struggle, but between an good antibiotic treatment and awesome willpower, I can now happily admit to having vanquished my illness. Actually I vanquished it a week ago, but it’s been a busy intervening few days. Lots to catch up on, so here goes!
I decided recently that I was going to go down to Michigan to visit an old composer friend of mine, Nico. Nico, besides being a fantastic composer of classical concert music, is also a great friend and a fun character. I think it’s probably a bit dangerous to have more than one crazy composer in close proximity to each other for more than a few hours, but we managed the whole weekend without breaking anything significant in the universe (I think…maybe I should go check).
I live near Toronto, Ontario, which is quite close to the Canada/USA border. Michigan is basically the closest state to us, and so in my naiveté, I figured that it should be easy to find a way to get down there. Due to some annoying complications, I don’t yet have my full driver’s license so I couldn’t just drive, which meant that I was stuck choosing between plane, train, and bus. Plane was too pricey, so I opted for train. Interestingly enough, there is no direct train route from Toronto to this particular suburb near Detroit.
Not one.
Perhaps I should have expected that the automobile state would reject such antiquated travel means as trains, but I still find it curious that there is not a single simple method to get where I wanted to go by train. Damn you, Amtrak. VIA Rail, you suck too.
By bus, it turns out, there is a fairly direct route, which was good news; and it’s comparatively cheap, which is great news. The bad news is that the travel time each way is about 8 hours, which is more or less the same amount of time it would take me to fly to Europe, were I so inclined. Alas, no friendship is complete without a few sacrifices and so, iPod in hand, I decided that the bus it would be. This was on Friday.
Now, when I bought the tickets, I had two options: I could either leave at 1AM from downtown Toronto and arrive in the morning, or leave at 8:30AM and arrive in the afternoon. I decided that the 8:30 one was slightly more humane, and so myself and my bag boarded the bus promptly on Friday morning, aching for coffee, sleep, and music.
For those of you in the know regarding the general area I live in, we came up to Milton and then across, stopping in 3 small towns on the way to London (Ontario). After a brief stop there, we carried on all the way to Windsor.
Things I discovered along the way:
- Greyhound buses are quite comfortable when they’re not too crowded.
- Canadians couldn’t match the colour of their scarf to the colour of their clothing outside of a major city area if their lives depended on it.
- Not one of my bus-mates seemed acquainted with the idea of using the bathroom before boarding the bus. Thankfully, there’s a small coffin- er, bathroom, at the back of the bus. Halfway to Windsor, I began to genuinely worry that it couldn’t possibly contain all the waste it was being fed.
- Speaking of feeding, granola bars make great bus meals.
- If you’re not into pretty natural landscapes (which I am, so it wasn’t an issue) the only entertaining thing to look at out the window on the stretch from London to Windsor is a series of incredibly suggestive road names — Longwood, Ripe Bush, etc. The intersections get particularly racy. It seems road makers get bored in rural Canada.
So…Windsor. One of the prettiest cities I’ve seen in the area. Really quite a comfortable, and charismatic sort of place; I got great vibes driving through and stopping over for a bit in the bus terminal. But all good things must come to an end, of course, and so we then continued on through the Windsor tunnel and ended up in the United States of America in the unwholesome failure of a metropolis known as Detroit.
The contrast between Detroit and Windsor is like night and day, and whereas in Windsor I felt quite comfortable, in Detroit I was fairly certain that I was going to get shot if I sneezed particularly loudly or exhibited bad posture or something. What a place. Oh, and the smell. An interesting mix of exhaust fumes, drugs, garbage, and poverty. And piss. With all due respect to its hypothetical nice portions, I have to say that Detroit is the single most abhorrent city I’ve ever had the misfortune of visiting. Did I mention it’s smelly? Just making sure.
After a fairly tense hour and a half sitting in a bus terminal nestled somewhere between the left and right ass cheeks of the city, I boarded another bus which took me to a little suburb about twenty minutes from Nico’s place, from where he picked me up. Thus began my weekend sojourn.
Without going into unnecessary details, it was a lot of fun and I hope to do it again sometime soon. Here’s a shot of the two of us from the trip. I am the taller and more evil-looking of the two:
My return to the world of school and work brought with it a brand new project! A student from the UK contacted me hoping for a couple of tracks for a university assignment for which he’d been working on an exciting little military arcade-style game called Spitfire. I was only too happy to flex my retro muscles a bit and put out some tracks for him, but it turned out that what he was looking for was less of a classic “retro” sound and more of a cinematic one that would fit in the retro setting. As far as I’m concerned, that’s even more exciting because it means I got the chance to work on blending the two styles together and seeing what I could come up with.
Some screenshots and descriptions later, I had two tracks done and I’d like to include them in here because I’m very happy with how they turned out:
Anyway, I hope you enjoy them! Now to catch up on some missed work from my little sick-leave…
