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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 18:45:01 GMT -5
There's gotta be some music lovers around here right?  |
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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 18:48:46 GMT -5
Mikey G has the best track titles  |
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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 18:52:15 GMT -5
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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 18:56:05 GMT -5
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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 18:58:43 GMT -5
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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 19:00:52 GMT -5
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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 19:01:55 GMT -5
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Post by architect on Dec 18, 2011 19:54:42 GMT -5
On The Score with Michael Giacchino Spying is a dangerous business, one where your survival depends on stealth and disguise, a skill set employed at barely above a whisper. On that account, it’s likely that Michael Giacchino wouldn’t last long as a member of the Impossible Mission Force. After all, his music is just having too much damn fun saving the planet with seconds to spare. For if he took on the terrorist 1% with pulse-pounding action in “Mission Impossible 3,” Giacchino’s newest IMF assignment for “Ghost Protocol” steps up the stylistic adrenalin to truly impossible runs of excitement and suspense. It’s an A-ticket adrenalin ride through retro spy rhythms, exotic musical locales and brassy action writing that seems like a superhero score waiting to happen.
Giacchino’s breakneck productivity has never lacked for melodic quality, always capturing the pure, melodic joy of the popcorn experience. With one foot obviously planted in movie and score fan geekdom, and the other in professionally crafted scoring, Giacchino is in very good standing to take the next-gen composer throne, especially while rappelling off the world’s tallest building in “Ghost Protocol.” Now as he takes a rare break in the midst of the “John Carter” music mix, Michael Giacchino talks about his own brilliantly burning fuse, one with no end in sight.
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Post by architect on Jan 4, 2012 20:58:00 GMT -5
AICN Talks to Giacchino Q: When you are playing music for him [Brad Bird] and you are actually deciding upon the notes of the score, what kind of direction does he give you? Is it more cinematic or is he actually directing you musically? What kind of conversations do you have?
MG: He never directs musically. He always directs with storytelling. His whole way of communicating is through storytelling and it’s all about, “What is the character feeling at this moment?” If he feels at a certain point in a scene he needs a shift, he’s not going to say, “I just need the music to suddenly be tense,” he’s going to say, “Well here’s what happens. At this moment he notices that she is noticing something about him and that is making him nervous.”
So he’s giving you reasons why it needs to shift. He’s walking you through the reasons why those changes are happening and that’s a big difference. Not all directors are able to have the freedom to discuss it in that sense and from day one with Brad it’s always just been about he storytelling. We never really talk about the kind of music it should be outside of maybe...The times that I remember discussing music were maybe on THE INCREDIBLES (2004) where he would discuss, “a big brassy feel like the old Henry Mancini or a John Berry kind of a thing.” He might reference that just as an overall generalization but the specifics are never about music. It’s always about the emotion that’s needed and the reasons why those emotions are triggered at any given moment.
Q: A fun yet challenging aspect to this score has to be the various ethnic locations used throughout the film. In modern films we seem to be shying away from using what may be viewed as stereotypical music to express other cultures. I certainly wouldn't say you were bashful at all about doing this. The Russian music couldn't have been more Russian with the use of the male choir and your harmonic choices. I love how you fully embraced the folk music of these various cultures especially in the Indian music where you compose an elaborate variation of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE theme cloaked in a quasi-Bollywood dance number. What a real musical treat!
MG: (Laughs) Yeah, that was fun and you know Brad’s feeling was, “Look, we're going to Russia, let’s make them feel like they are in Russia. We are going to Dubai. I want the audience to feel like they're in Dubai." As a matter-of-fact, the Dubai scene was one of the first scenes we scored. When we watched it later we realized we could actually do this better. So the music that's in there now is actually different from the original way we scored it. About a month after scoring the Dubai scenes we tackled Russia and India and I had made them feel so much like Russia and India that Brad felt that we should go back and make Dubai feel more like Dubai. I'm glad we did because it feels so much better than the way it was before.
Q: What about the Russian choir? Were you able to do that in LA or did you have to go to Russia?
MG: Yeah, we did that with some amazing singers here in LA. We had a men’s choir who came in and sang it all with us. One of the singers in the choir was a Russian guy who helped us with all of the different syllables that we were using. It’s all just made up words but they sound “Russian” and he was there helping us find Russian syllables that work really well together. If you're Russian and you listen to the music you'd be asking yourself, "What the hell are they singing?" But if you're not it just sounds like Russian music. Full article |
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Post by architect on Jan 4, 2012 21:26:04 GMT -5
Dan Wallin's ears aid 'Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol'  Just before noon on a clear fall day, the Newman stage on the 20th Century Fox lot is alive with bright lights, hovering microphones and a full 105-piece orchestra. It's one of the final scoring sessions for "Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol," and director Brad Bird and composer Michael Giacchino are listening closely to the music when a man with a snow-white ponytail and baseball cap leans over to whisper in Giacchino's ear. The composer nods and asks the conductor, Tim Simonec, to take it from the top, with a shade less emphasis on the piano.
The white-haired man behind the sound console is Dan Wallin, or Danny as he is widely known. At 84, he is the oldest working sound engineer in the film industry, yet his ears still rank among the sharpest around, according to his colleagues. He recognizes, often before anyone else, if the trombones should be doubled, if the saxophone is too brassy, or whether the timpani need to be taken down a notch.
"I think at this point I probably have more mileage in than anybody," the lanky engineer remarked over craft-services salads after a morning of scoring "Mission: Impossible." He has been on the Fox lot since 7 a.m., choosing and placing dozens of microphones on the stage, testing equipment and making sure all is in order before the first violinist draws her bow.
"We do everything all at one time — the tracking, rhythm, brass, string," Wallin says. "I prefer it, and the musicians prefer it too, because it's more of a performance." Full Article |
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Post by architect on Jan 29, 2012 16:09:35 GMT -5
MIGP Film Music Magazine Review Of all the television knock-offs that James Bond inspired during the height of the 007 craze in the 1960’s, “Mission: Impossible” was the spy show that ingrained itself in the public consciousness like no other. Creator Bruce Geller took the Bond franchise’s ever-increasing love of futuristic gadgets to the next techno-fetish level, with the unusual caveat of having its agents rely far more on their brainpower than seductive fisticuffs to take down the villains. And no small amount of “Impossible”’s iconic staying power through multiple TV revamps was due to the Lalo Schifrin theme, a white-hot jazz countdown that varied between flute cunning to brassy explosiveness, making for a “Mission” that no one would turn down, especially the big screen.
But beyond embodying its never-extinguishing fuse, Schifrin’s music also stood for the Impossible Mission Force itself, a band of spy brothers whose mad espionage skills were all about the slow burn of setting up the bad guy for a well-deserved con. Schifrin’s suspenseful, hep melody set the tone for the scores’ playfully combo of orchestral and nightclub suspense, a vibe that took John Barry’s Bond approach in an even jazzier direction, with just a touch of Shagadelia thrown into the mix. When “Mission” hit theaters in 1996, the musical focus darkened with Danny Elfman’s suspensefully quirky rhythms, then took Hans Zimmer’s flamenco-accented wall of sound. Even Michael Giacchino would provide the IMF with a relatively hard-assed orchestral approach the third time out, brought into the MI franchise by his Alias” TV spy partner J.J. Abrams for his feature directorial debut.
With “Ghost Protocol,” Giacchino stands as the first “Impossible” composer to make it more than a one-fer assignment. Better yet, he gets to considerably lighten up the series’ tone after the pretentious action posturing of the last two films, both of which didn’t begin to equal Brian De Palma’s slyly seditiousness at re-jiggering the formula that got the franchise off to a controversial bang. Yet this is also probably the most action-loaded and gadget-filled “Impossible” of the bunch, with the least amount of deductive reasoning applied. But what makes it all work, especially in Giacchino’s favor, is that Brad Bird is at the helm. A director whose previous animated work was filled with as much exhilarating flash as it was emotionally propelled character development. Continue Reading . . . |
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Post by roxthefox on Feb 27, 2012 0:52:11 GMT -5
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