Film Making
The Musical Score
When Emily first played me her film (with only the dialogue and the atmosphere sounds) - my initial feeling was that it was actually working very well without any music. Often, composers get asked to do two different things - to tell the audience what is happening ('something scary is about to happen' 'they're falling in love') or to raise the emotional pitch of a scene ('this is really sad' 'this is really uplifting').
Blind Spot certainly didn't need this - it seemed pretty stuffed with emotion already (in a good way) and didn't seem to want to tell the audience what to think. This suited me just fine, so I went about seeing if I could 'dance' around the spoken text and the atmos sounds to tie the whole piece together, soundwise, and aiming to keep the music quite emotionally ambiguous. I wasn't working to any sort of structural scheme (although I considered it`) and just worked intuitively.
I decided straight away that I wanted to use acoustic instruments and do something intimate and un-flashy - I went for a very tiny mandolin-like instrument from Argentina called a Charango, which I was given as a present. This is the instrument you hear most prominently - at the end there are two playing together.
Emily and I edited the track together - making a lot of crucial cuts. we were very conscious of not crowding out all the space that the film has. Bernard's eloquence speaks for itself, in a way.
