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Original Score For Dogtown Ranch Documentary

I recently had the pleasure of scoring a short documentary about Dogtown Ranch, an animal shelter east of Austin, Texas.

Dogtown Ranch Sanctuary Rescue and Rehab promotes education and training for persecuted and misunderstood bully breeds, but accepts all canine breeds in crisis, dogs needing to get off the streets and dogs needing to be rescued from euthanasia lists, and abusive situations.

Here’s the video:

And if you’d like to donate, you can do that, here.

Both tracks featured in the video are available for licensing, now:
Contemplation, Shelter

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Give The People What They Want

Directors Want Credits

Composer Deane Ogden is in the middle of an illuminating series of blog posts called Essential Skills of a Modern Day Film Composer which, as the title suggests, has the goal of identifying and improving the skills needed for getting and keeping work as a film composer.

There are three parts so far, but I’m focusing on Part 2, What Directors Want From Their Composers. Built from an anonymous survey of a handful of directors, it offers some great insights into their mindsets and approaches to music in their films and touches on everything from what they look for in potential composers to the drawbacks of temp scoring.

Filled with direct quotes and pretty pie charts, it’s a great read, not just for film composers, but for anyone interested in the collaborative creative process.

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Trailer Music 101

Variety has posted an interesting article on the basics and trends of trailer music. It features quotes from several editors, music supervisors, and production libraries. Thought it was worth sharing.

Trailer shops cue music: Unique sound brands movies

Trailers for big, glossy tentpole movies typically deliver a booming symphonic score or operatic choral sounds to convey an epic feeling, though the downside to such larger-than-life bombast is the ring of overfamiliarity. The teaser trailer for “Battle: Los Angeles,” on the other hand, broke with convention by using the sparse, eerie tune “The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black” from techno musician Johann Johannsson that played over wordless human action. It’s among the nominees for a Golden Trailer award.

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Conan!

A high quality re-recording of Basil Poledouris’s complete Conan the Barbarian score? This is bound to get Crom’s attention.

Also, I hear he has a new show premiering next week on TBS. Should be interesting.

Basil Poledouris has never been happy with both the original performance and the recording in Rome. The composer has always been very disappointed that the Rome orchestra could not provide every desired instrument he wanted in the score. This is now corrected for this new complete recording featuring 96 musicians and a choir of 100 voices.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (2CD) (CD)