Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.10 - M3 (Part 1)

Welcome to the next part of this composition walkthrough. The previous parts of this series are available here.

In this part we will cover the beginning of the Cue M3 - Car Chase.

As usual, we will work with score reductions, the full score, Midi and Audio File of the entire score are attached at the bottom of the post.

Here's today's sequence without music:

https://youtu.be/y1aVLZMtSRw?t=260

The spotting notes that I had for the sequence we're looking at today.

• 04:35:00 build up – serious
• 04:52:05 – hit and silence
• 04:55:00 – start

Recording of the sequence that we're looking at today: https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/hero-m3-bar-1-24/s-CTiqZUUnpJb

And the playback of the piano reduction: https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/hero-m3-bar-1-24-piano-reduction/s-HsQolN4RWSJ

The musical vocabulary of this cue in this scene might seem a bit "unconventional" if looked at it in isolation. Normally, such a cue would imply a more hybrid approach with more percussion, maybe even synths. A style that has been established by "The Fast and Furious". During the discussion of this scene, we were talking about this quite a bit. I felt that drifting away from the "classic orchestra" for that one scene would have broken the concept of the score and felt that we needed to keep it in this musical world that we had established. I remember a filmmaker friend critizising this particular music cue for exact this reason as he was expecting a "more electronic" approach and felt the path that we took for this scene as too "traditional".  While I can totally understand his point, I'm still convinced that the path we chose ultimately creates a more unifying musical and in consequence filmic quality. Having the rest of the score dictate the direction for this one scene in order to keep a homogenous concept felt like a reasonable compromise here.

Bar 1 - 13

We finished the cue M2 just a few seconds earlier, so the tonality of that previous cue is definitely still ringing in the audience's memory which made the decision to continue in the same key quite important.

The whole first section of this cue serves the purpose of building up tension that eventually culminates in the start of the race. Dramaturgically everybody knows and anticipates what is going to happen. The moment that the music is working towards is not really a surprise moment which from a structural point gives the music more chance to target towards its climax. If the target of the development was more unclear about when it happens, the music would need to stay more vague in order to not give away the surprise.

The cue essentially opens on a G, but pretty early on the minor tonality is implied. I felt like a pulse that feels almost like a clock ticking would add to the building suspense, so there is a motif established in the Celli. In bar 2 that motif gets extended a bit into something that resembles the motif that has already been used at the very opening of the movie. Of course the tremolo sustain in the violas and later on in the violins adds some additional tension to the music.

Bar 3 reinterprets the harmony into a Ebmaj7/G chord in the violins. There also is a little Gm texture added in the low woodwinds with polyrhythms. This is a bit gimmicky but I liked the idea of a musical analogy to the rumbling engine noises as well as providing a bit more tension.

Bar 5-8 basically build the Gm chord in a scalewise ascending motion in the low registers. This of course is a heavy cliché to build up tension but it nevertheless still works very effectively. 

The idea here was to create a "written out" crescendo that would build in tension but not go overboard with that build as after all we don't have a life or death tension here. So the buildup is relatively mild compared to what could have been done on the musical side. Only close to the climax, there are some heavier dissonances introduced.

But rather classically, bar 9 switches to a dominat field, starting out in a sort of D phrygian field (implied by the Eb and F in the 2nd Violins and Clarinet) forming a D7sus4(b) (in fact there is no dominant 7 (c) sounding but it feels implied, at least to me) building to a Ebmaj7/D in bar 10 and eventually and Ebm/D with an added G in the chord in bar 11. This bar also introduces the trumpets crescendoing in a chord as well as the high woodwinds now tightening up the rhythmical density.

In general, most often such long crescendos/buildups work better if they start building rather late. So an "exponential" growth often works better than a "linear", so delaying most of the build towards quite late works really effectively.

It has been communicated by the filmmakers very early on to create a "music hole" for the start of the race, effectively factoring the squeling tires of the cars into the music. This of course delays the actual start of the "action part" of that cue to a little later but we felt that this works incredibly well.

From bar 13 onward, it is very tricky to use simple chord symbols as from here on the cue transitions into some quite heavy bitonality.

Bar 13 effectively still functions as dominant to bar 14 which will be the tonic of G once again but you can see in that ascending buildup a constant shift between Gm and F#m in the high strings and WW with the brass introducing a chromatic ascending chord starting on Em in the last count of the bar.

Bar 14-24

Bar 14 opens with a "fanfare" that sets the "musical vocabulary" of the following sequence. Practically every chord of that fanfare is a "new" chord, with heavier counts on Gm, Eb and A. That tritone relation between Eb and A will play a larger role in the following bars.

Bar 15 eventually starts the actual action sequence in the music with attacking every 8th note. The strings function as rhythmical engine here that keep playing eighth notes almost through the entire sequence. You can see that Eb-A relationship in the horns (and strings) again. I respelled the A chord in the horns to make it easier readable. It looks rather weird in the score sheet but for the players the notes are easier to process like this.

Bar 17 reintroduces the "Evil Guy Fanfare" as he gets a bit of screen time in that sequence and seems to be rather sure of his victory. In order to not lose too much rhythmical momentum on the sustaining chord of bar 18, I used this common device of harmonic side-stepping to keep the pulse alive as seen in the trumpets. It alternates back and forth between the Gaug and A chord. 

Another really effective thing to use in ternary meters (as this 12/8) is to shift the rhythmical accents. Probably the most popular tune doing this prominently is "America" from West Side Story, which constantly alternates between a 6/8 and a 3/4 feel. I'm using this device here in bars19/20 switching to a 3/4 feeling (again harmonically alternating between Eb and A). This switch of feel is already hinted in the second half of bar 18 in the low registers.

In spite of all that bitonality, the underlaying harmonic structure of that passage is incredibly simple. 15-18 is effectively a Gm field (the tonic) with 17/18 switching to a tonality of A and 21-23 to a tonality of D. So to put it simple: a I-II-V.

21 again uses this Ebmaj7/D which we have seen before in that cue as a dominant. I felt the need to create a buildup here targeting towards 24 as with the downbeat of 24 we cut the first time back to the "reality" and the rather unspectacularly slow golf carts.

I use a similar device of ascending lines in that passage to build up towards the climax as done already at the beginning of the race.

Writing these walkthroughs gives me the chance to critically analyze what I have done and looking on this particular passage, if I were to rework it, I would rework the second half of bar 22 to align the line played by the strings/ww and the trumpets better with each other. As you can see the highest trumpet and strings/ww on that one beat walk on top of each other. Effectively this would probably not make a huge difference in how this cue sounds but the perfectionist in me is bugged by such things.

Again there is a constant bitonality implied here in the higher structures with the trumpets alternating between Eb and F (or Dm).

In general, this bitonal approach has of course the advantage of being relatively easy to digest as the structures are pretty clear to the ear and additionally being very interesting as the "pool of usable tones" is enlarged compared to a plain diatonic scale. And as you can see in this section, this approach can coexist quite easily with simple cadential movement that build larger structural elements.