Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.16 - M6 (Part 1)

In this part, we move on to the final (and climax) track of the score for the short film HERO.

All the previous parts of this series are available here.

The sequence in question starts at 10:19 in the video.

Other than usually, in this and the next part we will not be using short scores as there is so much going on in the music that a reduction wouldn't be much more reduced than actually looking at the score sheet, so I will change things up a bit today and use excerpts of the score sheet to explain what is going on. After these two parts, we will get back to the regular format with reductions.

As usual, the score sheet, MIDI File and recording of that cue is attached at the bottom of the post.

We're focussing on the first part of this cue today.

Here are the spotting notes that I had:

• 10:18:06 – very tense and dramatic
• 10:25:00 a little more heroic
• 10:36:20 – heroic but agony

So the purpose of the music is relatively clear here. The situation in the movie is very dramatic and in this moment the whole movie has taken a turn for a very serious situation that is far away from children playing as in all the sequences before. It is also the moment, where the older brother decides to bring a sacrifice for his younger brother. It is more or less the pivotal moment that this movie has been building up to so it was necessary to create a strong emotional statement with the music as well.

In retrospective, I would have liked to change the moment of entrance for the music a bit. Right now it happens "somewhere in between". There is no imminent visual cue or shift in the scene or the dramturgy so the music feels a bit like it comes in randomly. I would have liked to tie that moment a bit more to a visual or dramatic cue.

Bar1-4

We enter into the cue with a phrygian tonality of C as can be seen in the strings. If you gather the notes, from these bars into a scale you end up with C phrygian.

I wanted this section to be a relatively "sustainy" instable harmonic quality that would support the tensefulness of the scene but at the same time wanted to create a sense of pulse that moves it forward rhythmically. To achieve that I use a lot of "sf" accents in that sequence that attack the note relatively strong and then quickly fall back to a softer sustain. The choice to switch all strings but the double basses to tremolo has different reasons: fristly, the tremolo creates a more tenseful sound than regular arcos so I felt that would help the emotional quality that I wanted to transport here. However, double basses tremolo very quickly become quite noisy without much tone and lots of "scratch", I however wanted the root to be relatively stable and strong here so I opted for not having them playing tremolo.

The effect of accenting notes  that trasition into a sustain can also be seen in the brass:

I use stopped horns (a rather biting tone - again to support the tension) staggered rhythmically and harmonically into the strings which in conncetion creates a diatonic cluster of C phrygian that keeps partially attacking every quarter note. The low brass and trumpet add a swell as another rather textural element.

There is one more element going on which is the low woodwinds: 

I used that device already in the previous cue. It essentially is an outlined low C minor chord that due to its low register and the different rhythmical values feels more textural than actually being clearly perceivable. It just creates a "boiling" harmonic texture that I felt supported the tension here quite nicely.

Bar 5-8

In this bar, there is already a change in the harmony. As discussed during the spotting, the music needed to take a slight shift here already into a more heroic quality as the older brother is gathering his courage for his upcoming heroic rescue. I use a simple trick of "repurposing" the scale material that I have established and put it into a different tonal context by changing the chord underneath.

Other than this relatively dark C phyrgian from bar 1-4, here I use the same pitch material but put it on top of a Db chord (with F in the bass):

By that, it switches towards a Db lydian quality without it actually feeling like that much of a switch. Another reason of course is that I change the underlaying texture only slightly. The tenseful string tremolo remains and that rhythmical accenting of each quarter note in the "cluster" is being shifted into the high strings.

There are two more new elements introduced:

There's this pulsing figure that is being added in two trumpets, Marimba and Violas, which is just another "layer" that increases the tension. I generally find low trumpets to have a very menacing quality which I used here. The second new element are the relatively "fanfaric" horn chords which announce the heroism. They are Dbadd9 or Dbmaj9 chords that are of course very "open" sounding. The idea here was to give this some "call of heroism" on top of this tenseful underlaying texture.

The swells in the low brass become more regularly and I consciously placed them against the meter to not create a too clear rhythmical structure that would get too predictable.

The low woodwinds continue with their "low boiling chord".

Bar 9-13

The next four bars are supposed to create a switch again, the heroism is supposed to come through more but I also wanted to emotionally pick up that struggle and first failed attempts to free his younger brother.

The harmony changes bar wise from Ab/C to Cb(add#11) to D(#11)/A to Ebmaj7(#11)/G. I tried to pick up these two conflicting elements here in the harmony. There are these seemingly disconnected chords that create a relatively complex harmonic impression and seem to be descending into "despair" and there is this fighting melodic line that you can see in the horns.

The structure of this melody is build in a way that it constantly lands on a #11 and resolves that upwards just to become the #11 again after the next chord change that it overlaps into. There are several more melodic ideas going on at the same time that all are supposed to add to the emotional quality of conflict and not quite "focusing" the energy on one purpose (not just in the movie but also in a musical sense).

You can see the other elements in the strings (partially doubled in the woodwinds). There is a quite heavy divisi split going on here with 2nds, vlas and celli being split into two separate groups. I wanted to create a maximum "diversion" in the musical ideas here. The idea was to create harmonic situations that have hints of heroism but are never really stable there and instantly get harmonically repurposed. 

Additionally, there is that ascending triplet figure that keeps hitting the #11 of each chord from bar 10 onwards which in the next section will be the central driving force to push the music upwards.

The downbeat of bar 12 fell rather nicely on the moment where the engine slipped out of the older brother's hand and fell back on the younger one which added some extra drama. I didn't go for a big hitpoint there but only used a crescendo and added the low brass in this moment as I didn't feel like it needed to get an extra moment of drama by the music and  the higher goal here was to pick up for the big heroic moment that is following.

Bar 13 remains one bar longer on the Eb/G than what is structurally expected but of course was very welcome as it gave me more time to build up towards the next downbeat in 14 which of course was the big heroic climax.