My first project! :D Autsch!

I will now explain about my current project and its story so far... (I am VERY excited!) :D

When I started on my film school in October 2011 I ended up in a group where an experienced filmmaker from germany told us about a short film he had recently done in Germany. He told us about great methods they had used, how they had asked many places to shoot and eventually they got a house they could "set on fire" (only a LOT of smoke), the whole fire department was willing to help out, they got a bank where they would film a robbery and they found a practical way of shooting car conversations. First of all this was very inspirational! Some days after this I came to talk more to him about our interests and such where I told him that I was a composer and I preferred composing for classical orchestras. That was when he told me "be careful because I just might use you!" - and soon after he did!

He asked me if I wanted to the music for the half an hour short film and I said "I would love to! What kind of film is it?" expecting it to be drama, action, thriller or something like that. "It's a comedy" he replied and my first thought was "what??". I had imagined that my first film (and most films) would be adventurous, action and intense drama but I actually liked this challenge. I say challenge because the funniest melodies are all mostly taken now a days. He explained to me the story and I went home to start creating a main theme.

At first I wanted to make it for only a woodwind quintet and so I did. He gave me a rough cut of the film and I started picturing the atmosphere transferred into music and what parts would not need any music (sometimes the sound should just speak for itself). Then there came a busy time in the school and we didn't do anything. In december 2011 he asked me for a deadline because he needed something for the premiere. In February I thought it would be about time that I started to finish this off and started to look for a studio engineer to record it all (I wanted to make sure that it would be recorded). I googled and the first I found was www.darrenportfolio.com and I contacted him straight away. After this I spent three days to make all the soundtracks for the film so that I instantly could start looking for musicians.

The first thing I did was to announce it in UWL which is the university that my school is a part of. I thought that they might help me out with this as they have music students themselves and film music is very popular today. Long story short, they didn't help much out. We ended up asking several people before we finally got it on their student website. There we eventually got some musicians but not enough. (Don't feel discouraged - I'm simply writing about what in this case works and what not). After a month I started panicking because I had a very busy module coming up so we decided to have the recording days on the 12th and 13th of May 2012. I started e-mailing all the local orchestras with no reply. After one week I decided to call a number I had found online but that wasn't well liked - and I didn't get much help from there. This started to be a bit tricky.

Suddenly one evening the director told me that there was a website where you could look for musicians. I instantly posted out my need and that it was all done for Creative Commons license and thus for free. The next day a violinist applied and soon after a guy called Andrew Farid who offered me a his own whole orchestra! We instantly got in touch and tomorrow we are going to meet up to discuss and arrange everything.

Hope you found this encouraging and maybe you can try some things out / share some of your ideas.

 - Samal