Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.8 - M2 (Part 2)

As discussed in the last part of this series about my score for the short film HERO, this cue generally has a more light hearted and playful attitude than the last cue that we had a look at, as of course we now arrive in the world of the children.

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 the sequence without music: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1aVLZMtSRw&t=211

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

• 03:31:20: start, adventure with a little danger
• 03:44:00 – let the music loose steam

I generally wanted this cue to have an "adventurous" feeling which I personally connect more with ternary rhythms such as triplets or 6/8 which I employed here. To make this rhythmically even more exciting I switch between 6/8 and 3/4 feeling quite a bit. As we've discussed during the spotting, this sequence was supposed to be light hearted but still transport a bit of danger. This of course had influence on the decision about choosing a minor tonality as starting point. However it was essential to not let this tonality lead this cue emotionally too much towards "real" danger. In order to create some more wit to play along with the kids and their shenaningans , I decided to keep this cue very "fluid" in its tonality with a lot of bitonal sequences and bursts of major.

Bar 1-6

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/hero-m2-bar-1-16/s-X6JDxuJQ5BQ

We open the cue with a woodwind run in C melodic minor and a chromatic descending line in the lower instruments from Eb to C. An alternative to that would have been to start on the downbeat of bar 2 which however felt like a too strong entrance so I decided to give it that small propelling pickup. This melodic minor only lasts quite briefly as alreaday bar 4 establishes the note of Ab which indicates natural (or at least harmonic) minor. However for that first downbeat I still felt that the melodic minor had a more positive adventurous feeling than starting right away with natural minor.

In bar 2-4 we basically stay in a C minor tonality. The rhtyhm that is written for the higher strings is in fact considerably trickier to play and get tight together than writing contiuous eighth notes and I feel that one or two more takes here would have helped to get it tighter together. I still decided for this rhythm as it felt more bouncy and less aggressive compared to continuous eights.  In retrospective it might have worked better to notate bar 3 as a 3/4 rather than this 6/8. 

Bar 5 switches to a D7 tonality, which we could see as a harmonic modal interchange (borrowed that chord from C lydian rather than the C minor that we had up to this point). In order to create some musical consequence, this chord is reached by a similar device as the pickup bar in bar 1 (chromatic descending eights in the bass).

Notice how on the 4th eighth in bar 4 the bass note of a clashes quite heavily with the Ab chord that is played in the woodwinds at the same time. I remember trying it with Ab in the bass instead but felt it was too tame. Besides, this clash is so short that it barely is noticeable. 

The woodwind figure in bar 4 is basically built out of diatonic chords of Cm.

Bar 5 and 6 basically sustain on that D7 chord setting up a dominant for the following Gm. So the general tonality of that piece is kept rather unclear in these few bars. We seemingly settle on a Cm in the first bars but with that D7 (which I labeled a harmonic modal interchange from C lydian before) we could also look at it as a straight forward dominant for the Gm which when it arrives in bar 7 suddenly feels like it has been the tonic all along. This kind of ambiguity creates a harmonic excitement which I really wanted to have in this cue.

Some special attention should be put at the trumpets in bar 5 and 6 which alter back and forth between D and Ab triads (which are a tritone apart) and add to this harmonic instability (both chords could however be considered as being dominantic to Gm).

Bars 7-12

In bar 7 we reach the Gm tonality, which continues more or less in the same way as the bars before considering the rhythmical elements as well as the general distribution of tasks. In order to keep this piece more exciting I tend to move around the rhythmical accents in the bass instruments, which I started already in the preceding bars but use more extensively in these bars (particularly bar 7 and 8).

In bar 7 we also introduce the horns which are planing (moving in chords that are harmonically not necessarily related to the current overarching chord).

Bar 9 starts to become harmonically more active as we start to move back and forth between different rather remote chords. We also spontaneously switch to G major there which alternates to B major and repeats that in bar 10. These chords should not be considered as "functional" chords but rather as "harmonic colours". They actively steer the music away from having a clear tonic. And while these two chords don't exist at the same time, you could still consider this passage as "bitonal" as they alternate so quickly that I would argue that we understand these bars as a unit rather than separating the chords.

This major 3rd between these chords continues in bar 11 where we leap to an Eb chord. In this bar however, we pick up that harmonic idea from the trumpets in bar 5/6 again with an alternation between Eb and A which again are a tritone apart.

This whole "busy" harmony underscores the brief moments where the kids can't decide who goes with whom and especially the younger brother being "handed around", so I wanted to give the music this kind of "undecided" feeling as well.

The next harmonic target is the return back to Gm in bar 13. Bar 12 sets up harmonically for this. You could understand this bar as marked as an E7sus4(b9). If however you take the trumpets into consideration as well who are alternating between Dm and Em, it becomes more ambiguous. In any case it doesn't serve as a straight forward dominant towards Gm but somehow still feels like a dominant.

Bars 13-16

This sequence underscores how the younger brother is being put together with his older brother in the same car with the latter one being annoyed about that. So my target here was to support that slight comedy moment that we had here and give it some lightness. Consequentially, the lower register is thinned out, the higher strings provide a continuous G as an engine and the high woodwinds provide a chordal passage, again relying heavily on planing mainly on minor triads. There is a simple cadence of i-ii-i-iv all over a pedal G going on but the sidesteps in the woodwinds are always harmonized as minor triads (except for the very last D major in bar 16) which include a lot of non-scale notes. Yet, this technique of planing always works very well and often sounds musically more interesting than a "naked" melody would.