For your consideration at the 6th SCL Awards in the category of Outstanding Original Score for an Independent Film
First round voting is now open at this link until December 16, 2024. To cast your ballot scroll all the way to the bottom of the linked page. Must be a full voting SCL member in good standing to vote. Thank you!
2021 was the year climate change came home.
From the streets of Brooklyn to the forests of Siberia, a relentless barrage of fires, floods, and storms made devastatingly clear that the extreme weather climate scientists had been predicting for half a century had arrived.
Now, in a production of unprecedented scope, Emmy-winning filmmakers Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel chronicle that pivotal year through the eyes of everyday people around the world. Built out of thousands of hours of in-the-moment footage—no narration, no talking heads—The Here Now Project transforms the ordinary act of shooting a cell phone video into the radical act of bearing witness, capturing both the simultaneous, global nature of climate change itself and the deeply human resilience, resourcefulness, and courage needed to confront it. At once intimate, epic, immersive, and inspiring, the film is a wake-up call to the world from the world. The message: We’re all in this, together.
A climate-change documentary that is entirely comprised of found, personal footage shot by ordinary people all over the world - nothing added - deserves a score that matches.
So I made one - created entirely and exclusively from the sounds found in the original footage. Nothing added. (Well, except in the end credits...)
First round voting is now open at this link until December 16, 2024. To cast your ballot scroll all the way to the bottom of the linked page. Must be a full voting SCL member in good standing to vote. Thank you!
THE CHALLENGE OF USING FOUND SOUNDS IN SCORES
The exclusive use of sounds harvested from the original source footage allows for a wonderfully subtle and seamless underscore that blends perfectly into its environment and doesn’t feel heavy-handed in how it accompanies the emotions of the people in the film. But it does come with its own challenges:
First, it has to avoid confusing the audience. Every sound used as score has to clearly not be a sound coming from the environment of the film at that moment.
Second, the music still has to be able to do the job of a score - portrait an emotion, help make the moment more present, set a pace - all the things “normal” music scores do, this one has to be able to accomplish as well.
The solution - manipulate the source sounds until they “musicalize”. I mostly used resonators to over-emphasize tones already present in the original, filters to limit frequency content, some careful time-stretching to extend sounds, and classic methods like pitching sounds up (rarely) or down (more often). And then I sorted the results by what type of role they could fill - i.e. percussion, pads, tones - and what mood they suggest - i.e. aggressive, mellow, dark. The resulting palette was dubbed “The Here Now Orchestra” by the filmmakers and that’s what I used to create the score.
See player below for a few “before-after” samples of the original source sounds and their manipulated musical versions.
First round voting is now open at this link until December 16, 2024. To cast your ballot scroll all the way to the bottom of the linked page. Must be a full voting SCL member in good standing to vote. Thank you!
THE CHALLENGE OF AN OVERWHELMING SUBJECT
Most people don’t exactly line up to experience stories about climate change. This is a topic that can easily lead one to tune out or fall into a depression. But the footage tells a different story - yes, of devastation and sadness, but also of resiliency, reflection, action, even hope - and a lot of humor. Humans find both community and solace in humor, so there is a lot of it in this film.
In light of this it was important for the music to not get in the way of the wide range of human emotions present in the footage. We knew we didn’t want to get “funny” in the music even in the genuinely funny moments in the film, nor did we want to exclusively lean in on darkness and dread. Instead, we wanted to make sure that the music allowed for the same full range of emotional reactions that the people in the depicted moments experienced.
Below a track that accompanies footage from a locust infestation in Kenya. The energy, resilience and inventiveness of the humans as they confront the challenge is reflected, as is the visual beauty of the swarm.
First round voting is now open at this link until December 16, 2024. To cast your ballot scroll all the way to the bottom of the linked page. Must be a full voting SCL member in good standing to vote. Thank you!
