Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.1 - Introduction

In 2017 I had the honor of writing the score for an incredibly sweet short film by Andrew and Nate Garcia, called HERO. We recorded the score with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. You can see the final movie above. The score sheet for the score is attached below.

Since then the movie gained quite a bit of attention, winning several festivals. Based on a poll I did a few weeks ago, most of you guys would like to see a composition walkthrough for the title track Hero. However after thinking a bit about it, I figured it might be even more interesting to dissect the entire score including not only the purely musical but also scoring approaches as well as talk about the entire procedure of bringing that score to life.

I got the permission from the filmmakers to also show you raw versions of the movie, including its temp track as well as my work print, so I hope there are some interesting things to gather from this.

I got this gig rather out of the blue. In early 2017, Nate, one of the two filmmakers, wrote me an email that they discovered my music on Soundcloud and loved it and would like to talk about a short film project they were planning. They sent over the script and I absolutely loved the story. So we arranged for a skype call and got along very well. Both were huge film music fans, loving the classical 80s/90s film score sound and wanted the score for their short to reflect on this as well.

They financed this whole production on their own, wanting to push their reputation to more fictional work after doing a lot of commercials and corporate films. When we talked about the budget for the music I was surprised that they were willing to spend a big portion of the budget on the music, which I felt was a big honor but also slightly uncomfortable knowing that the rest of the cast and crew would go out with a low budget salary. However, considering how much music they needed, the budget they offered for the music was almost enough to hire a real orchestra for the score.

So they had a budget of about US$5000 for the music. I knew that recording/mixing about 9 minutes of music with a normal symphonic line-up in Prague including coverage of expenses and a little fee for the music would exceed that amount a bit. On the other hand, having a budget of US$5000 for nine minutes of sample produced music would be quite comfortable.  I knew that pushing for a real orchestra would significantly reduce what I would earn with the movie, but I had a hunch that this gig would probably pay in fun and enjoyment. As I at this point had already done quite a few projects that year that paid well but weren't super enjoyable and I also felt uncomfortable being the one person on the crew that earned considerably more than any other, I felt like making this into a "fun" instead of a "money" gig was definitely worth it. 

I communicated this to them which seemed to immediately spark their excitement. So a few days later they came back to me telling me that they definitely wanted to go for the real orchestra option and would raise the music budget to about US$7000 to make this happen.

So we agreed that this would be the way we wanted to go. I planned and budgeted a half session (2 hours of recording) in Prague and told them that the absolute limit of what we would be able to record in that time would be 10 minutes of music, preferably less as I had a feeling that the music would at times be quite challenging for the orchestra.

A few weeks later, the movie was shot and I received a first work print of it which was already very captivating. The great thing about how they were envisioning the movie was that the score didn't just play a role to support the story but the whole final sequence was planned in the way that the music would be the central element. In fact the last three minutes of the film including the resolution of the story would have practically only images and music.

This of course is an incredibly rare and welcome opportunity for every film composer being able to write music that is the center of attention. Naturally, I was very enthusiastic of getting the chance to have the music lead a pivotal sequence of the film.

Another interesting fact was, that they deliberately decided to only very sparsely use temp music, very often music that they considered to not fit perfectly and only to guide the rhythm of the edit a little. But many sequences that ended up having music had no temp score before that. They deliberately wanted to leave the creative space open for any ideas and not narrow me or themselves into any specific musical approach.

However, we all agreed that the filmic approach of the movie used a lot of the filmic language from movies from the 80s and 90s that we all loved so much that it was pretty clear that the music would also need to take that path.

However, the only big musical guideline I got from them was that they wanted the music to be "unapologetic emotional". We spoke about a few music tracks that we liked regarding their approach (which didn't necessarily fit for the score but gave a direction of the musical language).

We scheduled for a skype meeting to do a proper spotting session which lasted for several hours and I was very surprised on how specific they were able to formulate what they wanted the music to do without ever formulating anything that would define how they wanted the music to do it. For me personally, this is the ideal way of communication as you get a clear indication of what the music should do but don't get any boundaries of how to achieve that.

So this is how this project began. In the next part I will show you the spotting notes I made as well as the work print I worked to with the few temp track moments that were in there and the process of writing the main theme for this score.