Sailfish

November 26, 2007 by George Shaw.

The Thanksgiving holiday weekend is approaching an end, and I feel like I need to drag myself out of a lazy stupor. Fortunately I finished recording and mixing my latest score about a week ago, and was able to enjoy the holiday and take some much needed time to relax, veg, watch some movies, play video games, and spend time with friends and family.

I really needed a little time off to recharge myself, I’d been feeling burned out from composing non-stop since May, I’ve written over 2 hours of music in the last 6 months for a variety of projects. The most recent is a Chinese film entitled SAILFISH, was shot in Beijing and is being released by Warner Brothers China next year.

I’m told some of the actors in SAILFISH are pretty big stars in China. I’m not familiar enough with Chinese cinema to know how famous these actors are, but their performances are fantastic. I barely understand Mandarin (My Chinese is at a level of that of a 5 year old), but I was able to understand the emotions and actions of the scenes just from their body language and tone of voice.

At one point, I got notes from producers and it was all in Chinese, I had to wait a few days to get a translated version, and even then it was hard to decipher the notes due to some bad translations and lack of timecode. That’s one interesting challenge I had never faced before, though I was able to figure everything out by talking to the director over the phone. In a world of quick and convenient communication via email and text messages, sometimes a phone conversation is what gets the job done.

SAILFISH is a heart warming and romantic movie about a boy growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution who dreams of becoming a champion swimmer. And it is one of the most beautiful and thematically driven orchestral scores I’ve ever written. Some of my favorite melodies that I’ve ever written are in this film. You can listen to a suite of themes on my myspace page:

http://www.myspace.com/maestrosc

There’s also a cue from my score that is being featured as a demo for the new CineHarp Glissandi sample library. Some composer friends of mine that I went to school with created a sample library of harp glisses which I put to good use. It was nice to have some realistic sounding harp glisses, though they are no replacement for a real harp player. There were a few times when I wished to start and end on specific notes, or to stay within a certain range, but you can really only get that kind of specificity with a real musician. It did beat trying to slide my finger up and down my keyboard though! Take a listen here:

http://www.cinesamples.com/samples.html

Posted in Films | No Comments »