Manchild - Scoring a Soundtrack for Short Film

Manchild | Soundtrack For Short Film

The premise is simple. Take one roll of film and a Super 8 camera, then shoot a picture...

It sounds simple, but the Straight 8 competition is like no other, and there are strict rules that make it a challenging prospect.

Shoot a short film using one roll of film with no edits or colour grading and no post-production. Even the soundtrack for film must be recorded blind with no picture to score to!

To eliminate cheating, the competition organisers even process the film and line up the soundtrack with the first frame of the picture before the director sees their work.

The Soundtrack

Manchild and the Straight 8 competition are like nothing I've done before. With no images to reference, I had to write completely blind, using the storyboard and rough sync points as my only guides. Tempo decisions were made as best guesses, as were the dynamics and cadential points. Effectively, I scored this film by the seat of my pants.

Director Chris Watson had an idea for the overall direction of the soundtrack, referencing music by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. But for the details, I had to rely on intuition alone.

So, where do you start a soundtrack for film when you can't see the picture?

The instrumentation seemed an easy place to begin, a Jazz quartet featuring piano and vibes and a rhythm section of double bass and jazz kit.

Although nervous at first, I found my feet with the piano part, an upbeat but puzzlingly melancholy melody and chord accompaniment. I wrote the piece with Bill Evans in mind and leant into that Evansesque chord soloing for its rich, full sound.

The piece develops with the walking bass and kit parts building pace and intensity underneath the solo section, which riffs on the central theme.

I'm a big fan of the vibraphone and use it in many of my compositions. Vibes even find a place on band recordings, like in Spanning The Eternal Abyss from the album Now We Have Power, where vibraphonist Jim Heart did a brilliant job of soloing over some pretty tricky changes.

The vibes add a beautiful sparkle and fullness to the body of the chords in Manchild, rounding out the harmony before the piece takes a darker turn that underscores the film's shift in mood.

I had to turn this production around pretty quickly, just a couple of days, but once the picture and soundtrack came together, I couldn't have hoped for a better match! I was super pleased with how it turned out. Even better was that the film made it to the competition finals, where it featured in the London selection, shown at Picadilly Circus.