It’s been a while since I’ve posted about working on Souvenir November 2001, my first short. I decided a while ago that it really needed a proper sound edit, but my new Final Cut Pro install has had problems opening the project, and writing has distracted me from debugging.
Still, this week, I met with a cool young composer, Avery J. Brooks, about redoing the soundtrack for the film. We had a productive, fascinating discussion. Avery’s a friend of a friend (Fred Benenson, who, it turns out, is interning for Peter at Gizmodo. Is there anyone not working for Nick Denton these days?), and is alarmingly talented. Watching the current cut of SN01, he spotted emotional and narrative cues in the music that I never noticed.
Intuited, maybe, but never articulated. Jonah and I put tracks down by feel, more or less. Avery labelled one track “success,” another “disappointment,” another “random,” and so on, which mapped pretty closely to the main character’s emotional state as he half-blindly searches for a memorial he doesn’t know much about.
It’ll make a good summer project, we decided, and I’ll post updates of our discussion and clips as we go along. Meanwhile, check out Avery’s own site, where he posts performance info and some examples of his work.
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the making of, by greg allen