For the people who have asked about the music in the films.
All of the music in both films is originated and performed by me. Since my late teens, I have played the piano on a purely improvisational basis. Even though I took piano lessons as a child, I cannot read a single note.
When the time came for us to begin to shape the soundscape for films, we scouted around for existing pieces of music that we felt would work well with the images and eventually settled on a piece of John Cage’s music for percussion orchestra. Unfortunately, there were issues with both copyright and, eventually, with the feel of the music. As a result, we made a decision to set ourselves up to construct our own sound world. Since we were working with Apple technology, the software platform we chose was Logic Pro, the professional software program now frequently used for scoring feature films. My approach to creating the score was a very simple one. I improvised various piano pieces on a Roland RD 700 GX keyboard and drove them through East-West Quantum Leap instrument programs. My primary purpose was to create atmospheric backgrounds that complemented the emotive content of the films without detracting from them.
As I added layers to the original improvisations, they became more closely aligned to the visual action that I saw developing on screen. Probably 40 or 50 pieces of music were created over the last year or two that we eventually had available to work from. As we closed in on the final editing, I asked Johnny Coffeen to go back through all of the compositions and see if he could find specific segments that could be cut into the film. All of the sound choices were his, with the exception of the piano piece that is played over the montage section of the film. That sequence was done last minute as a simple improvisation while watching the montage repeatedly. I liked what I got so much on this that I ended up not changing a single note.
In the near future, we will be editing several of these pieces of music and posting them on iTunes for purchase. If you would like to be notified when the music becomes available please sign up here and we will send you an email as soon as they are listed.