Napoleon Audio Launched
Veteran agency and audio producer Gregg Singer has joined NY-based The Napoleon Group as executive producer of its newly launched Napoleon Audio. Singer’s hire was announced by Marty Napoleon, founder and CCO of the creative production and post house.
The naming of Singer, who spent a decade leading the audio production division of Sound Lounge, continues the company’s year-long period of expansion into new lines of business.
Singer’s professional experience ranges from TV and radio production, marketing, advertising and creative development to sales, management, budgeting and strategic planning. A Film & TV graduate of the Newhouse School at Syracuse, he got his start working on commercial shoots in New York. He transitioned to the agency side and worked his way up through the production department ranks. His experience includes working as a producer, sr. producer or head of production at such shops as JWT, BBDO, Bozell/Eskew, Cline Davis Mann and Kirshenbaum & Bond.
Singer joined the audio post facility Sound Lounge in 2002 to launch a full-service audio production company, adding a new dimension to its work in audio mixing. He left Sound Lounge in 2011 and most recently was a partner and EP at Propeller Music Group.
Napoleon Audio features two independent control rooms featuring mirrored gear, shared ISDN capabilities, a common network and separate isolation booths that can be linked or paired with either control room for simultaneous recording. Alongside the suites is an acoustically-treated stage that connects to the control rooms and enables the capture of live performances.
Singer intends to build on his previous accomplishments by integrating Napoleon’s audio capabilities with the group’s soup-to-nuts offering that spans pre-viz through live action production and post. “We’re creating a true full-service audio production company within The Napoleon Group,” he explained. “This will encompass everything from audio recording and mixing to in-studio direction and supervision, creative writing, sound design, original and stock music, music supervision and licensing, voiceover work and on-camera casting. It’s going to be a highly efficient and nimble resource for agencies and brands.” Napoleon Audio will also offer trafficking, talent services, location recording and foreign language services.
No stranger to the company or its culture, Singer was introduced to the shop in his earliest days in the industry. “As a young agency assistant producer, Napoleon Group was one of the first facilities I worked with,” he recalled. “I learned an enormous amount of my producing skills here.”
Mark Isham Scores The Accountant
Oscar-nominated and Grammy-winning composer Mark Isham teamed up with his frequent collaborator, director Gavin O’Connor, to create a score that explores a world of duality and intrigue for the action thriller The Accountant starring Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, and J.K. Simmons. It is the fourth film collaboration between O’Connor and Isham, following Miracle, Pride and Glory and Warrior. The Accountant is distributed by Warner Brothers. The score album is available on Watertower Music.
The Accountant follows Christian Wolff (Affleck), a math savant with more affinity for numbers than people. Behind the cover of a small-town CPA office, he works as a freelance accountant for some of the world’s most dangerous criminal organizations. With the Treasury Department’s Crime Enforcement Division, run by Ray King (Simmons), starting to close in, Wolff takes on a legitimate client: a state-of-the-art robotics company where an accounting clerk (Kendrick) has discovered a discrepancy involving millions of dollars.
For the film, Isham created a hybrid score, which includes a 78-piece orchestra, choir, solo cello as well as 27 feet of Steinways (three pianos). Isham explained that writing the score was a massive undertaking, but the challenge was necessary to tell the story. Tapping into his diverse musical talents, he provides a score that traverses between the structured world of accounting and the danger of the central character’s dual life.
“It is the most diverse score I have ever done, but it holds together through thematic unity—the score is based on mathematical equations and patterns,” Isham states. “Despite the lush orchestration and massive amounts of customized electronica, the music is not overly dramatic. The main character of The Accountant is a mathematical prodigy, and lives in the world of numbers and numeric patterns. Therefore, I wanted the music to reflect that. Part of the score was created using a series of simple patterns with enough randomness to create texture and nuance. As an example, two notes out of every three would be played, then 5 out of 7, etc. all juxtaposed together, then randomized with competing tempos!”
Isham has created critically acclaimed scores for over 100 films, including Crash, 42, Nell and A River Runs Through, for which he received a Best Original Score Oscar nomination. In 2013, Isham was recognized with the Distinguished Film Composer Award at the inaugural Middleburg Film Festival along with a concert by the Shenandoah Conservatory Symphony Orchestra of his memorable scores. His self-titled album, Mark Isham, earned him a Grammy Award.
Mark Isham’s accolades also include an Emmy award, a Golden Globe nomination and the Henry Mancini award for Career Achievement from ASCAP. Isham currently scores John Ridley’s critically acclaimed event series American Crime and the Emmy-nominated series Once Upon a Time, both for ABC. Upcoming film projects include Christopher Jenkins’ Duck Duck Goose as well as an adaptation of Lauren Kate’s #1 New York Times bestseller “Fallen.”
Bensi, Jurriaans Compose Amanda Knox
Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, a team of composers on the roster of Pulse Music, the NYC and Cape Town based music production house, composed the score for Amanda Knox, the Netflix documentary directed by Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn.
Amanda Knox premiered earlier in September at the Toronto International Film Fest, but Bensi & Jurriaans are no strangers to the film festival circuit. This year alone, nine films scored by the duo have premiered at Sundance, The Tribeca Film Festival, and at the Toronto Fest.
When asked about the composing process for Amanda Knox and what set it apart from other films, Jurriaans shared, “It was a huge amount of music and took about four months. Brian and Rod (the directors) had very strong ideas about how they wanted the music to help the story. The film is very unique in that it plays like a narrative feature. There are such strong characters–Amanda, Raphael, Mignini and Nick Pisa that all needed their own thematic material. We grounded the music in the lyricism often found in Italian music and the had to apply it to a huge range of emotion–the darkness of the murder, tragedy and sadness, and even some moments of absurdity that border on comedic.”
Bensi and Jurriaans’ other recent endeavors include scoring the recently released feature Christine, starring Rebecca Hall and directed by Antonio Campos.
