Computer Animation Arts

Thom Yorke talks about his soundtrack for the remake of Dario Argento's extraordinary horror film, Suspiria... Suspiria 2018 trailer

I'm clearly going a bit Moana mad, even to the extent of really wanting to buy my niece some slippers with Moana's pet pig Pua's face on them. O' the power of consumerism! Anyway, let's not get all philosophical here, many of you get plenty of that already. This little something will pleasantly borrow your ears while you're hard at work leading up to an imminent crit, or over the Xmas holidays. " Draw me like one of your French pigs. " ( source ) Happy holidays everyone and best of luck to you all, enjoy!

The Piano Guys (actually one pianist and a cellist) are a 500 million + views Youtube success, whose pared down melanges of beloved film themes have inspired an enthusiastic following.  They've just released their latest mash-up of Batman themes, featuring a fanboy's fantasia of batmobiles in their video.  For me, their Lord Of The Rings  cover provokes outbreaks of goose-bumps, and attests to the extraordinary achievement of Howard Shore's score for Jackson's impressive trilogy.

When previous The Tune's have featured the work of Bernard Herrmann, John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith, I’m probably taking a risk featuring the soundtrack from a Godzilla film. Then again Masaru Sato’s soundtrack to Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla probably has more cinematic credibility than you’d expect. Take the fact that Sato composed  the score for Akira Kurosawa’s hugely influential Yojimbo . It’s bombastic opening theme and iconic shots of the mysterious, vagabond samurai becoming instantly iconic . Jump forward a few years and Sergio Leone remakes Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars and the pieces slowly come together. Sato was one of the great Japanese film composers in an era where Godzilla was fair game as far creating serious musical landscapes goes. Though it's unfairly short, I really love this soundtrack. The closest comparison I can think of is Ennio Morricone's score to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It's very different in so much that Sato opted for a Bi...

Featuring the work of Jerry Goldsmith , James Horner, Eliot Goldenthal and John Frizzell, this 2009 concert by The Tenerife Film Orchestra & Choir is a selection box of musical motifs from the Alien franchise.  As always when I watch actual performances of classical music, I experience an attack of open-mouthed idiocy as I realise that I still don't know how all those human beings manipulating all those wooden and metal objects are actually making the music - or even more amazingly, how they're making all the hairs on my arms stand up. I give you Alien - A Biomechanical Symphony - happy listening.

In common with The Omen (1976), Ridley Scott's  Alien (1979) was another of those infamous horror-movies-for-grown-ups, that, as a small person, I was compelled to seek out and experience.   Alien was the film my mum had forbidden me from watching (after my dad insisted she watch it, much to her continuing regret!).  You knew right from those now famous opening credits, that Alien was serious in its intent to scare you - and that it was going to show you something truly otherworldly.  That intent is absolutely locked into what is sinister and strange about Goldsmith's score, with that opening agitation of strings and the melancholy, almost  ' The Last Post - like' horns (as if foreshadowing the proliferation of human casualities the film will soon be showing us).  It is in the Face Hugger cue included below that you really get to the aural identity of the film - that eerie, moaning wind sound, so desolate, so inhuman, created by blowing acro...

There hasn't been a ' TheTune' for a long time! I listened to this earlier today on BBC Radio 4 and really enjoyed it. It's a fairly technical discussion about how European classical composers like Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg influenced Hollywood film scores from the 1930's onwards. Catch it while it's still available! http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m0lv4 "Young British Composer Tarik O' Regan tells the story of how the tradition of Western classical music, its composers and maestros, underpinned the golden age of Hollywood film score. More or less the entire Hollywood music scene, as it blossomed in the 1930s, looked to serious European and Russian composers for film score composition. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, two of the greatest composers of 'serious' 20th century music, both lived and worked in LA - much to the consternation of the European classical music establishment. Many composers on the run from Europe i...

More John Barry means more James   Bond , and his film score for the fourth in the spy franchise, Thunderball (1965).  This was the Bond movie with the jet pack and much parodied 'pool of sharks'.  Musically, it's got that unmistakeable blend of menace, jazz and big band orchestration that so evokes the time and place of early Bond...  Apparently, after hitting - and sustaining - the last big, ballsy note at the end of the theme song (featured below), Tom Jones fainted in the recording booth! "It was a combination of the time (the early '60s), a collision of musical cultures (the end of the big-band era, the beginnings of rock) and the offbeat qualities of Ian Fleming's creation that led to Barry's unique mix of jazz, rock, pop and traditional orchestral writing. "John is part of the original DNA of the Bond film franchise," says Barbara Broccoli, producer of the Bond films since 1995 and daughter of original Bond producer...

John Barry , born in 1933,  died aged 77 in January 2011 .  I'll be featuring works by this late, great oscar-winning composer over the coming weeks for your listening pleasure, and w hat better way to introduce Barry's musical legacy t han with the brassy delights of his Goldfinger (1964) score, the soundtrack that locked down the musical identity of the long-running James Bond franchise.  I defy anyone listening to the excerpts below not to thrill to the jazzy raunchiness of Barry's music.  This is sexy, dangerous stuff...  Alpine Drive/Auric's Factory Oddjob's Pressing Engagement Goldfinger theme, lyrics by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse , performed by Shirley Bassey

To round off the series of ‘Tunes’ featuring Bernard Hermann, I’m featuring his final ever score. The soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 New Hollywood masterpiece. Taxi Driver. Recording apparently finished hours before Hermann’s death in 1975 and Scorsese’s film was released to incredible critical acclaim. It became the seminal film of a generation. Hermann’s score meanwhile becoming something of a revered cult classic amongst soundtrack-lovers, traded amongst collectors like the guns and drugs of the film. Not his most famous or recognisable, but for me at least, easily one of his best. Like all great film soundtracks, the music in Taxi Driver becomes the landscape of film as much as the imagery. The palpable tensions and inner madness of the main character Travis Bickle ripple across the eardrums like some sort of sleaze filled tsunami. Slate.com has a great article about the soundtrack. “What resulted from their collaboration is an astonishing piece of film music ...

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) is a clammy, psychoanalyst's dream of a movie. The scene in which James Stewart's character refashions Kim Novak into the exact likeness of the dead woman with whom he is obsessed erotically is not easily forgotten, and the then-innovative camera effect evoking Stewart's character's fear of heights is now an established device in cinema's bag of tricks . Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo manages to be both dreamy and menacing, with its use of shivery strings and circling motif. As Martin Scorsese observed in a 2004 edition of Sight & Sound magazine: "Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for — he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession." Prelude/The Rooftop

Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's game-changing 1960 classic frightener Psycho couldn't be further from the lush orchestration of his 7th Voyage of Sinbad . Herrmann's strings-centric music hardly needs any introduction, so famous is his composition accompanying the iconic, much parodied murder of luckless Marion Crane . Psycho 's score is one of the great pleasures of cinema; it is pared down and propulsive, driving the film fowards at a terrific whip. Like the film itself, Herrmann's music is 'black and white' - a monochrome of strings. The Psycho Suite

The Sinbad movies, featuring the Dynamation delights of stop-motion pioneer, Ray Harryhausen , represent another essential component of my childhood viewing. Many rainy Sunday afternoons were spent delighting in Harryhausen's fantastical creations and Sinbad's various quests, trials and tribulations. Bernard Herrmann's score for the Harryhausen-produced The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) is lushly orchestrated, effortlessly evocative and a delight to revisit, and in the swooning Baghdad movement, you'll detect nascent hints of Herrmann's Vertigo . Be sure to listen out for the Duel With The Skeleton @ 2.15 - you can hear the bones clacking together. (You can view the sequence here ). Overture/The Duel With The Skeleton/Baghdad For excerpts from Herrmann's The Day The Earth Stood Still score, go here.

Film composer, Bernard Herrmann will be forever associated with the films of Alfred Hitchcock - and with Pyscho 's infamous jarring strings in particula r. I'm going to be showcasing Herrmann's work 'little and often' on the CGAA Blog, so you can expect 'death-by-violin' to feature soon enough. I'm kicking things off with Herrmann's eerie and hugely influential score to Robert Wise's 1951 science-fiction classic The Day The Earth Stood Still . Herrmann utilised the theremin in his scoring for the film - an early electronic instrument now synonymous with 1950's science-fiction. It gives the composer's music a truly other-worldly sound. Just hearing this score makes me ache with nostalgia for a time when classic 1950's sci-fi would play on BBC 2 opposite the six o'clock news on BBC 1 - my first exposure as a child to flying saucers, robots - and the music of Bernard Herrmann. Prelude/Radar Gort/Visor/The Telescop e For more ...

A great site to share with you: soundworkscollection.com. I've included below just one of the featured videos from the site which takes you behind-the-scenes of the sound design for film and animation - The Sound of Transformers 3 . "The goal for the SoundWorks Collection is simple; we are dedicated to profiling the greatest and upcoming sound minds from around the world and highlight their contributions. The SoundWorks Collection was created by Director Michael Coleman in November of 2009 in a partnership with MIX Magazine, several audio focused college schools and programs, and the support of the online sound community worldwide. The SoundWorks Collection takes you behind the scenes and straight to the dub stage for a look into audio post-production for feature films, video game sound design, and original soundtrack composition. This exclusive and intimate video series focuses on individuals and teams behind-the-scenes bringing to life some of the worlds most exciting p...