Mural OST - Drifting
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/486325
An animation student recently messaged me asking if I could rearrange a piece of mine called Drifting for a short film he is developing.
While I've had a number of pieces used in videos and flash games, this is the first time that I've went the opposite direction and set music to film. It was a lot more difficult than I imagined, because synching the music to the visual cues created all kinds of headaches with timing.
I had to take a nearly five minute piece and boil it down to two figuring out which parts were relevant to the short film and which were extraneous. In the film there is a significant visual cue where the entire mood changes, and I was desperately trying to get the music to fit up to that point. I had a sixteen bar phrase preceding it but ending up several seconds short. Slowing down the tempo to compensate sounded ridiculous forcing me to recompose much of the piece. I had to change the harmonic rhythm to get something like an 18 bar phrase. All of this was challenging but also an enormous amount of fun. I can't wait to score more films now.
The video might be submitted to film festivals, so I can't link to it for a few months. Also, I improvised the piano part at the beginning and end, but everything in the middle is sequenced with mouse/keyboard.
Constructive criticisms or other thoughts?