Mondo Beacho report March 31 - amassing songs

L-R: Erik Hammen, Sarah Winsor, Ahren Buhmann
(photo by David Thomas)

I got a lot done on Mondo Beacho this week.

It was kind of gloomy here in Seattle, but the sun finally came out yesterday and I went out for a run. On my new route, I passed right by the area you see in the photo on the left, where we shot a few scenes last summer.

I spent a lot of time talking over email with Greg Wharmby this week. Greg is one of the handful of great musicians around the country (including but not limited to Graig Markel, Punishment, Thomas Wold, Fermentation, and Thee Samedi) that I'm working with on the huge variety of tracks we need to complete the soundtrack for Mondo Beacho.

It's a lot of people, I'll tell ya what.

In fact, one might say that as usual, I'm doing a lot of "collaborating"!

Here's the tricky thing about movie music. It's more about feeling than melody. And, in Mondo Beacho, most of the music is presented as actual songs motivated by a specific source (usually the radio), as opposed to traditional omniscient soundtrack cues.

So in addition to being great tunes, these songs have to be specifically-atmospheric, the right tempo, and sound right with the rest of the film, and not get in the way of dialogue or suggest the wrong thing through lyrics.

In other words, the music has to serve the movie, not vise versa.

I have very high hopes for my musicians, because any gaps left over will have to be filled in by me. Unfortunately, I have to fill the gaps first, then backfill with new tunes as they come in.

I generally like to work on songs one at a time, but I've found with the amount of material and the sort of material I need to crank out, my burnout rate is a lot lower I actually have a bunch of pieces in progress at once. So I blast away on one song until I can't get any farther with it, and then switch over to a different one and keep working. Ultimately, it's headphone-fatigue that makes me stop for the day.

Arrangement is a big thing. And instrument choice. Sometimes the 20 dollar plastic, belt-clip preamp sounds more "right" than the real thing. Sometimes the cheezy software keyboard emulator that everyone in the world owns and is sick of sounds very right...  but only after I put it through a phalanx of top-secret studio-processing tricks of the damned. Many which I learned in making my previous film, Time of the Robots.

Speaking of studio tricks, I'm also working on getting together with David Thomas, to go over the mixes he's done of all the performance material, and today, I'm sending out release forms to all the musicians whose music is already baked into the rough cut!

Very exciting.

Rough cut getting close

L-R:   Riley Neldam, Kenna Kettrick,
Ahren Buhmann, Sarah Winsor, and John the extra
(photo by Jennifer Dice)

Summer in the northwest -- it's later than it looks.

We're on the beach -- Golden Gardens -- for the bonfire scene. Shooting with a permit, in front of a slightly unpermitted fire-pit constructed of an old Smokey Joe with its legs yanked off, buried in the sand.

We had a fire captain -- Jennifer Dice-- whose job was to make the fire bigger.

Foom! Up it went.

Do people sing around bonfires anymore? They do where I come from. Last time I was back east visiting my brother Bret and his family, we had a bonfire in his backyard. My niece Freya lent me her plastic cowgirl guitar, and we were able to squeeze a few tunes out of it.

Group singing is good for the brain.

The world-famous St. Olaf Choir holds hands when they sing, the whole lot of them. It helps them function as a single unit. The vibrations and empathy are transmitted directly. They don't have to worry about holding a guitar, though.

Or a beer can.

In the editing room, the bonfire scene had some unusual challenges. Honestly, I was stumped for a couple of days over the best way to cut it. But I cracked the code yesterday afternoon.

Now that I've got a grip on the whole thing, I hope to finish the rough cut this coming week, and then start on the remaining music tracks immediately after.

I'm pretty excited to get going on the music.