Making Film Music Digitally: Temp Tracks and Mock-ups - Text 3
Composers can thus work with considerable precision, right down to the individual image. The software, combining audio takes with musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) resources, offers composers almost unlimited creative possibilities, particularly through the use of plug-ins (virtual instruments and effects modules).[6]
In their work, composers are often guided by the film director, the image editor, the music editor[7] and the music supervisor,[8] who place the temporary music, known as temp tracks. These tracks make known the musical intentions to be observed in composing the original music. The composer’s proposals must take these intentions into account, sometimes placing the composer in a delicate situation, caught between his or her own creativity and the concern to remain close to a piece of music to which the filmmaker is in many cases accustomed: “Directors and producers become so convinced, accustomed and perhaps ‘married’ to the ‘temp’ (‘temp love’) that composers are often requested to emulate it.”[9] The use of a temp track is not new,[10] but it has undeniably become widespread, sometimes forcing the greatest composers to plagiarize their peers[11] or even themselves.[12]
Guided by both the image and the temp track, composers must submit their ideas in the form of mock-ups. Normally, they have a month to prepare the mock-ups for a feature fiction film. This work is part of the “pre-phonographic system,”[13] prefiguring the “phonographic system” (recording). The mock-up is often composed directly on a computer, which represents a major difference in the way the musical material is approached compared to earlier manuscript practices, from the studio system in classical American cinema to the composing habits of John Williams. The final result is thus strongly influenced by the specificities of the new technological set-up:
Software has its own logic and specific possibilities which can structure the musical phenomena and thus influence the composing quite directly: many composers, depending on the amount of time available to them and the extent to which they have taken up the technology, are tempted to use only the software or parts of the software they command the best, under-utilizing complex procedures and limiting themselves to what is immediately accessible.[14]
Working on a computer, which was systematized by Hans Zimmer (nominated for an Academy Award in 1989 for his entirely synthetic score for Rain Man) and his production studios Remote Control,[15] leads to a number of musical qualities known collectively as the “Media Ventures style.”[16] At the same time, working on a computer offers so many possibilities that it is possible to come up with many different approaches.
The “Léandri snippet” cue in the film Les Seigneurs (Olivier Dahan, 2011) was composed by Guillaume Roussel, who has worked at Remote Control since 2010, from a temp track put together by the music supervisor Édouard Dubois. Our example begins at the moment when Jean Reno (playing himself) reminds the former professional football player David Léandri (Franck Dubosc) his missed penalty kick, a “panenka,” against Spain. Léandri, who came for an audition in order to begin an acting career, then relives (in a flashback with a subjective sound perspective) every image of that catastrophic moment which put an end to his career.
