I finally watched Oppenheimer and I am excited about doing so again. It’s exactly the kind of media that I’m grateful for—emotionally charged, morally reflective, and incredibly inspirational. My ideas surrounding the major themes are still being developed (might need a few more watches for clarity) but I can say now that just like everyone else is, I too am in love with the film score.
It has provided a very useful base to do work with too! Destroyer Of Worlds, for one, has looped for about 30 minutes as I’ve tidied up evening commits and started typing out this entry. The feeling is almost as incredible as the one I felt when I heard “A Model of the Universe” for the first time. It is not just these songs, though. There is something incredible about (film) instrumentals that fill me with happy chemicals: the way the sound washes over me—pacing my thoughts and bringing clarity when I am tackling something ambiguous.
By virtue of my work, I am always expending some significant mental energy. There are problems to solve; there are applications to build. Some days it feels like in a three-second time delta, my mind travels across 3 million distinct topics/concepts (pardon the hyperbole) that I’m concurrently trying to process and make sense of at once so that I may tackle the task at hand. The scores make everything so lucid and clear, and whenever I want to get in the zone, I have a healthy collection of instrumentals that help me do that.
A lot of this definitely boils down to the complementary nature that exists in film scores. Whether it is a violin resonating on a specific scale or a synthesised beat that plays with the texture of the final sound, the main goal remains to cascade over on-screen events and enrich the viewer's cinematic experience. You hardly ever find scores in active competition with the other visual elements in a film. They are so subtle most people don’t even notice them, but they are there all right, plucking the strings of your subconscious mind to bring about the necessary emotional response.
I like to imagine that this is also part of the reason they serve well as background music when it is time for me to do important work. If I am listening to some pop or rap—all genres I love, by the way—it is easy to get caught up with the story already being told by the songwriter. Having to subconsciously process the lyrics makes it harder for my own thoughts to flow. My scores, however, have no words, and the soft undertones act as expansive meadows for my thoughts to run into. By their nature, they do not take centre stage. Instead, whatever notes I can hear do well to just support the main elements (my thought processes) like they would in a film.
I think this is why I will always remain in the loop regarding new film releases. It is not so much about the actors with me, and my excitement over a talented composer scoring a film almost always supersedes my interest in the film content. In my head, all it means is that I have even more songs (from an already large collection) to pick from when I want to create a base to do work with.
I finally watched Oppenheimer and I am excited about doing so again. It’s exactly the kind of media that I’m grateful for—emotionally charged, morally reflective, and incredibly inspirational. My ideas surrounding the major themes are still being developed (might need a few more watches for clarity) but I can say now that just like everyone else is, I too am in love with the film score.
It has provided a very useful base to do work with too! Destroyer Of Worlds, for one, has looped for about 30 minutes as I’ve tidied up evening commits and started typing out this entry. The feeling is almost as incredible as the one I felt when I heard “A Model of the Universe” for the first time. It is not just these songs, though. There is something incredible about (film) instrumentals that fill me with happy chemicals: the way the sound washes over me—pacing my thoughts and bringing clarity when I am tackling something ambiguous.
By virtue of my work, I am always expending some significant mental energy. There are problems to solve; there are applications to build. Some days it feels like in a three-second time delta, my mind travels across 3 million distinct topics/concepts (pardon the hyperbole) that I’m concurrently trying to process and make sense of at once so that I may tackle the task at hand. The scores make everything so lucid and clear, and whenever I want to get in the zone, I have a healthy collection of instrumentals that help me do that.
A lot of this definitely boils down to the complementary nature that exists in film scores. Whether it is a violin resonating on a specific scale or a synthesised beat that plays with the texture of the final sound, the main goal remains to cascade over on-screen events and enrich the viewer's cinematic experience. You hardly ever find scores in active competition with the other visual elements in a film. They are so subtle most people don’t even notice them, but they are there all right, plucking the strings of your subconscious mind to bring about the necessary emotional response.
I like to imagine that this is also part of the reason they serve well as background music when it is time for me to do important work. If I am listening to some pop or rap—all genres I love, by the way—it is easy to get caught up with the story already being told by the songwriter. Having to subconsciously process the lyrics makes it harder for my own thoughts to flow. My scores, however, have no words, and the soft undertones act as expansive meadows for my thoughts to run into. By their nature, they do not take centre stage. Instead, whatever notes I can hear do well to just support the main elements (my thought processes) like they would in a film.
I think this is why I will always remain in the loop regarding new film releases. It is not so much about the actors with me, and my excitement over a talented composer scoring a film almost always supersedes my interest in the film content. In my head, all it means is that I have even more songs (from an already large collection) to pick from when I want to create a base to do work with.