After my previous quickie promo video for my orchestral action track ‘Attack Of The Machines’, I decided to try and produce something a bit better looking. As I’ve said before, I’m no video editor; I usually leave that part to my clients and focus on the music but I thought it’d be good to try and improve my video editing skills. So I bought a copy of Sony Vegas and with the help of some trailer footage from Terminator Salvation, I’ve recut the video to try and fit with my music. It’s not perfect but hopefully my video editing skills are slowly improving.

As usual, download and license the orchestral action track for your films & trailers from my music shop:

http://www.thebluemask.com/shop/attack-of-the-machines/

Thanks to the joys of DVD boxsets, I’ve been catching up on loads of great TV shows over the last six months: Battlestar Galactica, House, The Wire. They’re all amazing shows, the cream of modern TV, but they all make me realise I still haven’t seen anything to top what is (for me) the greatest TV series of all time.

I watched The Sopranos all the way through during its run on TV, and then watched the whole thing again when it came out on DVD. Apart from having the sharpest writing and dialogue of any TV show I’ve ever seen, one thing that really stuck out through the whole series was the use of music.

There’s no score, just songs, but they fit so perfectly it’s hard to imagine anything else working as well. The music supervisors did such an amazing job, some of the tracks feel like they were written just for the show.  Some of the music highlights for me were:

I could only find a few examples on Youtube, but the John Cooper Clarke track is one of my favourites. Sublime. Ever since watching the show, I started wondering what songs I might have picked if I’d had the dream job of The Sopranos music supervisor. These would be a few on my list:

Man, I miss that show…

Here’s a brief excerpt from artists Wyllie O’Hagan’s short film: Still Life: London featuring my piano music soundtrack Leaving Paris.

Wyllie O’Hagan: “The moving image artwork, explores a quest for stillness in a hectic world. Two screens project moving images with piano soundtrack. One screen shows a personal collection of still, quiet life objects, beautifully considered and composed, revealed at a reflective pace. The second screen shows abstract energetic lines wildly drawn with light.”

Still Life: London has already had highly praised screenings at Toronto and London film festivals and has now been accepted in two more international festivals in Mexico and Melbourne:

Mexico’s Expresión en Corto International Film Festival
Melbourne International Animation Festival

More info:

Leaving Paris (buy the instrumental piano music from my mp3 shop):
http://www.thebluemask.com/shop/leaving-paris/

Wyllie O’Hagan:
http://www.wyllieohagan.com/

A short film which I provided the music soundtrack for, London: Still Life by artists Wyllie O’Hagan, is screening at the 7th London Short Film Festival. The film will be playing alongside several others around 4:30pm on Saturday 16th January, 2010. Might see you there!

Sat 16th January, 2010 – 4:30pm
Roxy Bar & Screen
128-132 Borough High Street,
London,
SE1 1LB
(Tube: London Bridge – see directions)

In a response to requests to provide full length previews of my music tracks, these are now available in the shop. The previews are of slightly lower quality and interspersed with copyright info every 20 seconds but this is obviously not present on any of the final tracks you buy!

The previews are available for all music tracks including all the royalty free collections (though there might be one or two older tracks still to be updated – should be complete very soon). Hopefully this will help provide you with a better idea if the track is suitable by hearing it in full before you buy.

Listen to the previews in the shop:

http://www.thebluemask.com/shop/

The first episode of the documentary series I recently scored the music for, ‘Evolution: The Grand Experiment‘ by AVC Films, is being broadcast in the UK this week (Wednesday 2nd December to Monday 7th December) on Sky Channel 586. It’s also playing on many other TV channels across the US, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and other countries.

UK: Sky Channel 586 (UCB)
Wed 2nd Dec @ 7.30pm
Thu 3rd Dec @ 10.30am (repeat)
Sun 6th Dec @ 9.30pm (repeat)
Mon 7th Dec @ 3pm (repeat)

The release of the hour long documentary coincides with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Full details of the show, along with worldwide broadcast channels, dates and times can be found here.

If you’re not a Sky subscriber, you can also stream the documentary live from UCB during the transmission times from the UCB website here.