Breathing Music into Movies
Hard at work for the Berlinale Talent Campus Score Competition, the three participants share some thoughts on their musical sensibilities and their approach to the material.
The participants in the Score Competition pose with Ryuichi Sakamoto.
They’re thirtyish, they’re passionate about music and they all have plenty on their plates this week. Christoph Fleischmann (33) from Germany, Pablo Pico (29) from France and Enrica Sciandrone (30) – a British resident from Italy – are all participants of this year’s Berlinale Talent Campus Score Competition. They have only a couple of days to compose a full score for a five-minute animated short by Juan Pablo Zaramella.
A story of a light-bulb factory worker who dreams of constructing a balloon to escape his life of numbing labour, LUMINARIS has Chaplinesque overtones that weren’t lost on Pico: “I wanted parts of my score to stress the mechanical nature of the protagonist’s routine, and juxtapose them with his private world of more jazzy rhythms”. Sciandrone also went the silent-movie way, if in a more sweeping fashion: “I tend to gravitate towards orchestral music and I’m a big fan of John Williams, even though some of his work may seem old-fashioned today”.
All three Talents had to prepare sheet music for their compositions, which were then performed by a full orchestra. Marcie Jost, head of the Score Competition says “one of the key factors during the qualification process was to get people with orchestral experience. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to handle the big task ahead of them”.
“The great thing is that we all have different musical backgrounds and sensibilities”, says Fleischmann. “For example, I went against the mechanical nature of the characters’ movement. I wanted to breathe life into them, even though they resemble floating paper figures, with no leg movement whatsoever”.
Luckily, I was able to witness the process of Pico tweaking his score, with layer after layer of effects being lovingly piled upon one another. As the film’s hero takes a heavy kick in the pants, the sound effect is surprisingly understated. “I didn’t want to go for the obvious underscoring of the image by the music”, says Pablo.
The project’s general overseer – as well as the head of the Score Competition jury – Ryuichi Sakamoto is the Oscar-winning legend and electronic-music pioneer whose credits include Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE LAST EMPEROR and a number of other scores for the likes of Brian De Palma and Nagisa Oshima.
Sakamoto, whose schedule unfortunately proved too tight to enable an interview, arrived at the studio to look at the Talents’ work exactly as I was leaving the premises. I did get a glimpse of his black-cloaked, supremely regal figure, moving gracefully and greeting the Talents with a near-fatherly warmth. I bet that some day in the future, it will be them nurturing young talent of tomorrow.
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