A Father's Job - Short Film Score - Concept and Main Theme

In July and August, I had the pleasure to write the score for the very ambitioned short film "A Father's Job" which we were lucky enough to record in Prague in a phase of relative low Corona cases.

Here's the trailer for the movie:

https://vimeo.com/455451490

The story is about a family in Germany during World War 2 that suffers from the psychological implications and consequences of being torn apart due to the war and escaping into alcoholism - so a pretty serious mixture of topics.

The rather complex story also includes a pretty heavy plot twist and also works with different layers of time and memories that add to a rather disorienting and disturbing overall film experience.

The movie is currently doing the festival round with the filmmaker hoping to open some doors for him with it so it's going to be a while until it will be made public.

Nevertheless, the soundtrack will release on October 22nd on all streaming platforms but of course you will get an early access as well as deeper look into it.

I spent quite some time coming up with a compelling concept for the score with the filmmaker giving me a lot of freedom in how to approach it. In general, I feel that having a strong musical concept for a project is half of the work.

From the beginning it was quite clear that a full orchestral line-up would have been way too much for this movie which generally deals with rather intimate looks into a disturbed family life. So it was pretty clear that we would be going for a chamber sized approach. The movie was temp tracked with a lot of music from Ludowico Einaudi, dominating with piano. 

Personally, I'm really over the "dramatic emotional piano" scores. It of course works very effectively and there also is one cue in this score as well that incorporates piano, but I always try to avoid being too piano heavy in such situations as I feel that this is a very generic device that makes it difficult to give the score a unique soul.

I was leaning towards a small string ensemble as I felt this would provide enough colour possibilities as well as giving the possibility to be quite intimate in the sound.

After it was clear that Corona and the budget would allow to record it with real musicians, I refined that concept some more.

As I have been recording many times in Smecky Studios in Prague, I knew the studio and location very well and with it being rather small in size I felt that it was the perfect fit for this kind of score. However, I came up with the idea of using the space to its fullest extent and envision the score around a specific seating.

This was the line-up and seating that we eventually recorded:

As the movie includes a lot of flashbacks and moments that are not quite clear whether they are real or imaginations of a drunk mind the idea was to work with left-right and far-near effects, to allow the music to mimic disorienting impulses from different directions and distances. With higher notes generally being easier to localize for our ear I mainly used the 5 violins that are spread out the most in their seating to provide this effect. Also the two harps sitting far left and far right work very well in this regard.

You might notice that behind Vln1, there is an additional quad microphone setup which gave us considerably more direction in the sound sources during the mix. The effect of these distances works incredibly well in the surround mix, which we consciously placed "around" the listener. There is only a voiceover and not a lot of sound fx going on through most of the movie so it was appropriate to have the music take over more space than normally.

The cue above is a stereo downmix and doesn't play as much with these effects as other cues. I will post a few more cues soon that play more with this seating.

In general, this movie didn't feel to me like it needed a very specific melodic theme as the presence of such wouldn't have helped the movie in any way on the dramaturgic level. You could consider that cue above as some sort of main theme, however, the only recurring element is that descending chord progression that starts at around :32. In general, the linking elements of that score are either more gestural or textural. I associated the increasing decay of the family bonds with descending musical figures while the more hopeful sequences at the beginning of the movie get more ascending lines. The cue here is a bit of a mixture as it more or less ends the movie in dispair but on the other hand portrays the memories of better times.

With alcohol and alcoholism playing another big role in this movie, I associated the sound of a glass harmonica with it. I tried to get this recorded live but unfortunately, there was neither an instrument nor a player available in Prague so it ended up being a sampled one. This sound most of the time is used more specific on certain moments where the alcohol plays a role in the story rather than as a throughgoing texture.

In general, the score ended up being very elegic and sad and generally quite soft which made it very easy for the ensemble and the usually very soft harps to balance. There are only two cues that are a bit more dynamic (one of them being the one above).

I also used a few supporting synth sounds here and there but really just to support and not to lead.

In general, I'm very happy how the score turned out (also sonically), it was quite a bit of a struggle to even out the ensemble, particularly on moments where one note is being handed from one violin player to the other in several cues where it was challenging to make them all play the note with the same intensitiy and tone but after a few takes we got some really great results. As with every very soft score, there is a base level of noises that happen here and there which are practically not possible to prevent (and also not possible to get rid of with restauration tools as they usually are on all microphones). 

As I said, I will post more music from the score soon and also tell a bit more about the score itself. For now, the score sheet for the cue above is attached below.