Oathless

From the outset I always wanted music to play a significant role in the overall production. Looking at the script and storyboards the car scene, hotel corridor and sex sequence seemed the appropriate choice in which to implement the music. Having the first scene play without music in order to capture the raw emotion, the car scene would then act as the breathing space in which would justify the use of a suitable score, another layer to the scene to emphasise her situation. This score will transcend into the sex sequence where the tone will remain the same beautiful but harrowing to contrast with the distressing sexual montage. The slight ambiguity of having an alluring score played over Sugar uncomfortably fornicating with a client having previously and having poured her heart out to an unknown phone recipient has an interesting clash of emotion both strong and very different but compliment each other when synchronised together.

Before shooting the film I trawled Soundcloud and the MusicBed in order to find a track that would fit the piece until I stumbled on a composer 'Simon Housley' with his Soundcloud alias as 'Oathless'. His Bandcamp description read that he was a recently graduated student that had studied music technology, I felt he was the perfect person the approach, he also had a extensive collection of tracks to listen through giving me confidence that he was more than capable of scoring our film.

I sent him an email regarding the production including all details of our situation, deadline and style of the piece including a mood board that I showed in the pitch and another I put together with our casting video of the chosen actor, in which he replied swiftly. Later on in the semester once we had a fine cut he was able to send me a track that was custom fit to the film. However it was far from what I had envisioned so proceeded in further contact to create something that really worked. Using pieces from both tracks we could find the perfect tone for the film. The email process was difficult as I could only send him links to tracks that sounded close to what I wanted and describe vividly what I wanted, obviously having Simon sit down in person would have been much better however I feel that despite the email communication I was still able to get Simon to produce a track that was highly suitable for the film. From this I have learnt in future to approach artists earlier on in the production and possibly meet face to face to discuss the criteria and fine details.


Below is one of the tracks from Simon's album titled 'Peripheral - music for an imaginary film'.