The Award-Winning short film's soundtrack...

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ultratwin
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The Award-Winning short film's soundtrack...

Post by ultratwin »

For you non-Facebookers who may have missed my post this evening...

I wish the my soundtrack won the award, but it was the film itself. Last summer, Chan-wook Park (Old Boy, etc.) selected the little flick I scored at the Mise-en-scène film festival, and now it's live and can be streamed. It was noted by locals who saw it to be a somewhat puzzling sci-fi flick of sorts, and since there are no subtitles(unlike the screened version) it should leave any viewer very well confused from start to finish. Here's the premise, unless you'd prefer to guess as to what's actually going on.
► Show Spoiler
THE LINK

And how does this relate to ss.org? Though long and boring without understanding Korean, from watching the film and hearing the music, some of you might be able to guess: The director was a real hardass on me for being too "melodic" in my first three attempts at scoring the early edits of the film, as her original idea of a "�gætis byrjun-era Sigur Ros" soundscape, as much as it excited us both at first, soon dissolved into more or less a (musical) sound design experiment, over half of which got cut out to focus more on the silence and desolate isolation the protagonist embodied. What made the final cut was a suite of very minimal short pieces.

In the end, I took some of the more coherent parts of my first few trashed tries and scrunched them all together...which became my 2014 Doom Compilation submatz of "The Man of Sorrows". Thank goodness for recycling, I'm grateful for the whole experience and glad both the final product as well as the tasty scraps could get some use.
Last edited by ultratwin on Wed Mar 26, 2014 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Concretebadger
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Post by Concretebadger »

Wow, congrats to your director...Chan-wook Park is one of my filmmaking heroes, so anyone who gets his seal of approval deserves a pat on the back. I'll give the film itself a look now.

Contemporary artists (as opposed to traditional 'orchestral' works) doing film/TV scores always interest me - it's fascinating to hear how they use the pre-existing structure of the storyline/cinematography to do something different from what they usually do. I've read some interviews with the likes of 65dos and Mogwai when they did 'soundscape-y' stuff for soundtracks, and how working around what's happening on-screen is an unusual challenge. It must've been a really rewarding (if occasionally frustrating!) experience for you. Nice one!
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ultratwin
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Post by ultratwin »

Rewarding indeed!

The cool thing in retrospect is that I was somewhat forced to put together something that, as objectively as I can tell, sure sounds like me but is a more or less a deconstructed suite of what I'm prone to write when left to my own devices. Both the opening "distant piano" and its development in closing credits motif were actually a melodic quote from my 1997 graduation piece, and director Soyoung Jung kept pushing me to make the phrase more "sparse sounding", irregular in note spacing, and repetitive.

At 28 and someone who rarely smiles or says a friendly word, her bending of Korean social mores and customs came across like a bit of an enigma to me at the time, also like my wife being a Jeju native that is of few words yet highly opinionated. It also struck odd me of how plainly she requested an entire new version after each of the four video edits (side note: I did this thing for free, for experience's sake) that nearly all required some rewriting of sections to fit the timing/dynamic arch, and when I heard from my boss/sole funder how little gratitude she expressed toward him until the very end and didn't even drop by to say hi after winning the award, I realized she was probably one of those quiet genius directors who very few could get along with.

But more than that, the growth I experienced getting out of my usual mold was very welcoming and I'm glad I had a chance to lock horns with her along the way to break off an unneeded antler or two of mine. And for that reason I'd frankly love to give another go with her if the occasion arises ;)