Netflix Original Series
Written and Produced by Vin Diesel

Return
David Whyte, Poet
Jeff Rona, Composer

Artist: Ozomalti
Remix by Jeff Rona

With Aaron Eckhart, Jessica Alba, and Elizabeth Banks

You can download a free pdf of excerpts from the 2nd Edition of The Reel World here.

Now some quick background.

Keyboard Magazine

Some years ago, before I composed for a living, I was a musician helping cook up cool sounds and musical ideas for films and film composers (I also worked on a lot of records, but that’s for another day). My work came to the attention of Keyboard Magazine, then the most prestigious mag for modern musicians.

The founder and editor of Keyboard was a gentleman named Dominic Milano. One very cool dude. We have remained good friends to this day. Keyboard Magazine started in a small building that he shared with two young entrepreneurs starting a home computer business called Apple Computer. But that was before my time. Dominic knew my work and asked if I would write a column each month on technology. It’s all I did all day, and so there was plenty to write about. And I started a column on synths, computers, studio technology and mostly about my own work. It was a sort of diary for nerdy musicians, and became a popular part of the magazine for a while.

But I started to get busy as a composer and I was no longer interested in writing about technology. So I proposed a new idea, to write about my various projects as a composer using as much technology as possible, but from a much more creative perspective. I called it The Reel World and it was a part of the magazine up until just a few years ago (though the last several years were sporadic).

At one point Dominic suggested turning the best columns from the series into a book. At first this seemed really exciting to me. A book! So I took all my articles and layed them out to try and come up with a way to organize them all. Some I just tossed aside. But others seemed to fit well into one of three main categories:

• Art and Aesthetics
• Craft and Technology
• Career and Business

Once I did that, I sat and reread the whole thing. And I hated it. I had learned so much along the way, and technology had changed over time. A lot of it just didn’t feel all that useful. By this time I had worked on a lot of films and tv projects. So I spent the next year  just rewriting everything I knew about how to score films. How to break down scenes, find the emotional center of a moment, create a musical arc, use the tech to your best advantage, and how to make a career out of composing. When I finished, I added interviews with friends and colleagues to add more perspective. I spoke with John Williams, Hans Zimmer, James Newton-Howard, Mark Isham, Basil Poledouris, Marc Shaimen, agents, music editors, supervisors, studio executives, and more.

Finally it felt like a book. I released it in 2001 and it became a very popular book on the subject.I chose a kind of retro 50′s movie poster look:

1st Edition

It got a lot of terrific response and feedback. It became a standard text all over the world. It was an unexpected and very rewarding experience for me, and put me in touch with some very cool people all over the planet. Job done.

Only not really.

I kept working and growing as an artist. And the technology for composing to picture exploded. So after a number of years I went to my publisher and begged them to let me redo the book and bring it up to date in regards to everything. They agreed and the end result was another year of writing and rewriting, interviewing, editing, and expanding every element of the book.

And along with the new content came a new cover. This one:

2nd Edition

Click the link on the top to read a few chapters. The book is for sale on Amazon, or if you want a signed copy (and you know you do) then buy it right here on the website. Enjoy.

The score to Sony Playstation God of War III has been nominated for the 2010 Hollywood Music In Media Award. I share the nomination with the rest of the team of Cris Velasco, Mike Reagan, Gerard Marino, and Ron Fish. All terrific composers. It was fun and a real creative challange. I created about 25 minutes of original material, and as the developers completed the game, tracks were remixed and rearranged into a number of variations.

You can hear some of my favorite tracks here.

We recorded the score last fall at Lucas Film’s Skywalker Ranch in northern California. It’s an amazing facility. State of the art in a rustic natural setting. The staff there is the best I’ve worked with, including head engineer Leslie Ann Jones (daughter of the brilliant band leader Spike Jones). The team from Sony ran things with amazing precision and polish.

Here are some of my pictures from the sessions:

The Orchestra at Skywalker Studio	Lucas head engineer Leslie Ann Jones	The local watering hole in Nacasio
A few beers the night before we recorded	Ron Fish, Gerrard Marino and Mike Reagan	The Skywalker Scoring Stage

God of Couch III

The Hollywood Music in Media Awards are Thursday, November 18, 2010 6:00 pm.

I recently recorded the orchestra for a small film called The Chosen One. The film was released on DVD and is likely to come out in limited release either late this year or early in 2011. The score is a blend of lush orchestra with some great solo work from guitars and flutes from South America. It’s a more traditional style score for me, as the themes of the film makers really wanted a score to carry real emotional weight. You can listen to the entire score here and it is available on iTunes and Amazon as well.

The film centers around a man who has lost his zest for life, and is ready to end it all. But an unexpected visit from some Colombian “holy men” cause him to rethink his views of life and himself. The score underlines this with a contrast between more traditional western themes in piano and strings, and the more vibrant sounds of South America with guitar,  charango and panflute. I play several of the flutes myself, but I was fortunate to get Stephen Kujala to come to the studio to play. We also recorded George Doering on all sorts of guitars. The charangos were recorded with a remote linkup with a studio in Santiago, Chile.

The orchestra was recorded at the fantastic Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers with about a 60 players. My wonderful orchestrator was the fiery latin Roger Julià. As we were on a bit of a tight budget I was truly fortunate to have my band of tireless interns from the Columbia College in Chicago out to lend a hand.

The schedule leading up the the session was pretty brutal. A lot of sleep was lost by all.

For all the piano solos, we had the brilliant (and sensitive) Mike Lang.

After recording the orchestra we moved on with a wild percussion session at The Village with the legendary Alex Acuna along with Efrain Toro and multi-instrumentalist Satnam Rangotra.

All the tracks were mixed in downtown Los Angeles at the studio of Jim Hill, my favorite mixing engineer. We mixed to a set of several stems to isolate each section of the ensemble (orchestra, piano, percussion, solos) and delivered the final version to the dub stage.

Have a listen to the tracks. We may have a limited edition of signed CDs soon.

Feature Film
Directed by Rob Schneider
Starring Steve Buscemi, Rob Schneider

Video Game
The third installment of the epic game series God of War.

I really want to keep this more current. I am on Facebook and MySpace (barely) and am finally keeping things on Twitter as well. I just completed the score to The Tortured, working with director Darren Lynn Bousman. He’s a great guy, and while his name doesn’t appear on the film (he came in later to rework the film from the ground up), his mark is everywhere. Hopefully a score will be out shortly. Waiting to find out about the release of the film.
I’m pleased that the 2nd Edition of The Reel World is ACTUALLY OUT! I hope to have copies to sign soon as well. If you are interested, drop me a line.
I’ll be at the Aspen Music Festival again this year. I missed last year due to obligations in China prepping for the Olympics. But I’ll be artist-in-residence from July 9th to the 14th. Aspen in the summer is unbelievably beautiful, and I hear that this year is no exception.