Q&A with Composer Andreas Weidinger
First off - can you tell everybody about your background in music and composing:
That's quite a long story, but to cut it short: I'm a classically trained musician, composer and conductor with some background in Pop Music. Since I was a child I always loved making music and I always wanted to invent music. During high school and college I learned to play a couple of instruments pretty well - piano, all kinds of guitars, bassoon. After my college diploma I started studying bassoon (and a few medieval wind instruments), music theory, composition and conducting at the university of arts in Berlin, Munich and Pisa, Italy.
I got my first piano lessons and started composing when I was 9. As long as I remember I always wrote music in any style, that interested me. From classical contemporary music to traditional song writing for my own bands or other artists.
As much as I loved music I always loved the movies, even as a child. At a certain point of my life it was just logical to bring those two passions together. So I started writing film music and working as a professional film music composer.
By the way: Just recently I found some of the first sketches I've ever written. It consists of only one melody in the bass clef. The handwritten title was: "Scary melody"...:-)).
How did you come to score Shockwave, Darkside?
I've known Christian (Arnold-Betuel), the Executive Producer of Shockwave, for many years now. I was the composer on one of the first movies he ever produced and we had a great time on that. We always kept in touch but never got the chance to work together again. So when he told me about Shockwave I was very interested. Then he gave me the script and I was thrilled. This was the kind of movie I was looking for! Challenging, interesting, emotional and very special. He asked me to meet Jay on Skype and see if we get along together and share ideas. It was a bit risky because we didn't know anything about each other. I hadn't seen any footage from the movie and Jay hadn't heard any of my music.
But the amazing thing was: We immediately "clicked". From the beginning I felt that he was a director with a clear vision, but still was open minded for radical new ideas. He had a great sense of humor, which helps to keep the spirits up in complex projects. And he was charming, respectful and disarmingly honest. So I wrote an email to Christian: "Jay's great. The movie will be great. I'm in."
Can you tell us a little about your approach to scoring the film?
We went through a lot of different and difficult stages in finding the tonality that's appropriate for that movie. We tried literally everything from electronica-techno-industrial stuff through Trent Reznor-inspired sounds to classical melody driven orchestral music. Nothing seemed to be really appropriate.
One part of this challenge was the nature of the production. The CGI and a lot of visual information was incorporated step by step and it was pretty hard for me in the beginning to figure out, how the movie should look and feel at the end. Most of the time I didn't have a picture that was even close to final. Some scenes just showed a few persons with gray helmets lying in a sandpit, where there was a battle supposed to be going on around them.
The movie proceeded slowly step by step to the final cut and with every version I got, I gained a better understanding of the aesthetics and the way the story moved. The more picture I got, the easier I could find the emotional and atmospheric essence of it so to say.
What we agreeing from the first place: We wanted the music to sound organic and somehow human at the bottom of its heart- even when using electronic or technoid sounds. So I started recording and collecting organic sounds. Breathing, humming, murmuring, bowed guitar strings, damped door slams etc. and started manipulating those electronically.
The goal was to bring a soundscape to live that reflected the extraordinary visual aesthetics as well as the emotional essence of the story. And this has a lot do with silence and questions like "How does the moon sound? How does silence really sound?".
I wrote a lot of themes and musical material with and for the slowly growing picture. When the picture was almost final, I turned off my computers, sat down on my desk with pen and paper and started from the scratch. But of course with all the knowledge about the movie in mind, that I had aggregated so far. I wrote a 15 minute orchestra suite just with pen and paper. No piano, no picture. Everything was just in my head.
After recording the suite and some particular parts of it I mixed the orchestral pieces with some of the work I'd done so far and put it to picture. Surprisingly there were very few adjustments necessary. Most of the music was spot on - in terms of timing and in terms of emotion. In retrospect I'd say the general approach to the music was trying to give humanity a voice through bringing together classical musical values with the sounds of the future - which is by the way one of the essences of the whole movie.
Shockwave, Darkside is primarily a symphonic score, can you tell us a little about it's creation?
I have a long lasting relationship with the German Filmorchestra Berlin Babelsberg, the oldest european film music orchestra that's still existing. I think I've done more than a dozen big orchestra scores with them as a composer, so I was very happy to work with them.
It is always a special moment when you hear a whole orchestra playing your music for the first time live. It hardly can be described. Especially in this case when there wasn't any mockup or electronic simulation of the orchestra before the recording.
And for the first time I did a remote session - meaning I was in my studio in Munich, the orchestra recorded in Berlin and I was following over the internet. It's a funny coincidence: In a way the orchestra remote session was like what we did all the time working on Shockwave with Jay and all the other people: We worked through the internet most of the time.
In this case it was a bit strange because I couldn't conduct my own music as I usually do. And I couldn't interact with the musicians the way I'm used to - with a lot of gestures. But at the end of the day everybody did a great job - the orchestra as well as the conductor Lorenz Dangel, a good friend and fellow composer and Falko Duczmal, the engineer. The music was very difficult to play and to conduct and everybody was basically sight-reading. There was no time to prepare before the session. And when they started to play the opening and I heard the first build-up and the first climax I knew I would be really happy with the results.
What's your favorite piece of music that you wrote for Shockwave and can you tell us a bit of how you came up with it?
That's for sure the opening. As I said, I emptied my head out, sat down at my desk and just started from scratch. I really didn't "think" about the music I had written the months before, I just tried to feel and write down the different colours and emotions that struck me. I imagined sitting in a spaceship flying towards the moon and pretending the moon has a gravitational force, that pulls me nearer faster and faster and...BOOOMMM...
So with the history of all the conversations I had with Jay, with all the music I had already written and thrown away, I just sat down and wrote what came to me. I think the opening five minutes took me just about two hours from the blank page to the final ready-to-copy score. I was literally writing that piece as I would've written a letter, in a state of extreme concentration. I'm glad, my studio wasn't exploding, because I'm not sure I would've realized...:-)
A lot of work, I guess. I'm currently writing music for Ironclad2 - Battle for Blood and I think there are one or two other exciting projects coming this year, that will be announced shortly. But first I need to finish this one and get some sleep afterwards...
Final Question - What lies on the dark side of the moon…?
Definitely a lot of silence, however it might sound...and probably some funny jokes Jay deposited there through his secret NASA connections...:-)
