‘Mould’ is a short film which tells a story of ‘mental illness and identity set in a particularly technophilic world.’ A man and his clone meet face to face, with plans for their future existence.
Originally, music was not going to be used in the film, which meant that when I started scoring I had a blank canvas with which to work. Upon first seeing the visuals, I knew there were two musical directions I could take. As the film was described to me as being loosely ‘sci-fi,’ one direction I could have gone down would have been a synth-heavy, high intensity and intimidating route to accentuate certain ‘horror’ aspects in the visuals, stemming from the clone. However, the route I decided on was a more ‘human’ approach, and instead I wanted to focus on the ‘human’ character more closely, paying close attention to his emotions and making the musical narrative about that.
Here are a few scenes from the film I wanted to comment on:
Below is a flashback scene about a forgotten memory. The coming together of a man and his wife.
I tried to separate the scene into three parts through the use of instrumentation. In the first section, the main-synth claws its way forward, gasping, but always petering out just before reaching its end, to help simulate the feeling of clutching at memories. This is accompanied by the guitars washing around underneath to give a sense of nostalgia. Buried in the background, are subtle female vocals that I used to hint at a ‘wife’ theme which I could return to in later scenes.
In the second section I wanted the instrumentation to feel quite abrupt and jarring, as if the memory is almost there, on the tip of your mind but keeps being pushed off course. I played around with manipulating the timing of organic sounds to help accentuate this feeling, the feeling of ‘moulding and breaking’ instruments trying to play coherently and harmoniously.
The third section is as if the memory has been realised, and with this a sense of excitement creeps in with the pace picking up, and with soothing strings rounding things off before a bittersweet climax.
In these end scenes below, I tried to tie the motifs from earlier in the score together. The most notable music cues are firstly, throughout the revelation leading up to, ‘That was six years ago Leonard’, I wanted to create a wall of sound washing over everything to express the emotion in the scene. The denial, disbelief and sadness of the revelation washes over Leonard and I wanted this to be echoed in the music, the strings panning left and right giving a slightly woozy and disorientating feel that in earlier scenes gave a sense of warmth and hope.
Secondly, later in the scene when the pill is pushed towards Leonard and his wife is mentioned again, ‘Anne will be waiting’, I brought back the vocals I introduced in part in the flashback scene which represent her character. The music then slowly disintegrates into increasingly granular distortion, the once pure sounds of the glockenspiel pulled and stretched until breaking point, clicking and popping until it comes to an abrupt stop and the scene changes.
Below is music alone:
Production Company : Bear Bait Films
Director : Josh Ormerod
Producer : Jordan Daynes
Sound Recordist and Designer : Ross Wilkes-Houghton
Music Composition : Jack Matthias