1) We were asked to produce a 3 part symphony for a live event at the Musรฉe Du Louvre in Paris which would be performed in timed-relation to animation which was being generated by the music. Every aspect of the production needed to be coordinated with the client, agency, event producers, film production company, animation company, a 52-piece French orchestra, a studio recording and live recording, all to happen over the course 2 days. Through the many challenges we relied heavily our experience, honed over several years of work with Spotify at SXSW. Thankfully the event was a big success we were asked to produce a second performance in Munich. Pretty gratifying.
2) In the early part of 2017 we were hired to compose the score for Year Million on NatGeo. My fellow NY-based composer, Timo Elliston, and our Prague-based composer, Viliam Bรฉreลก, teamed to write an hour of original score-to-picture per week for the series. It was incredibly challenging because of the compressed production schedule as well as the show’s multi-genre format, which was essentially four kinds of shows rolled into one. It made for many late nights and weekends, but the end result was definitely worth it and wildly rewarding creatively. Figuring out how to do that and maintain the spur-of-the-moment, on-demand advertising work kept us on our toes, to be sure.
3) I first joined BANG as a producer but started to write consistently for advertising projects within the first couple of years. At the same time we were beginning to work more in TV & Film and as those areas started to grow, I began managing more aspects of company with our Founder, Lyle Greenfield. After becoming his partner and eventually our President, I found my time pretty evenly divided between writing music and running the business with Lyle and our partner, Brad Stratton. I really like the excitement and challenge of developing our business, both creatively and intellectually. But there are certainly days when wish I could just hole up in my studio and write music without being interrupted by “the business.”
4) While every year seems to have a new paradigm in terms of budgets and deliverables (i.e. additional versions you’ll be asked to do for the same budget), it does seem like things have leveled out somewhat and that clients are starting understand that online projects require the same amount of work and skill as broadcast projects. As more and more things are produced for both traditional & non-traditional media, I think we’ll continue to be asked to iterate more and more content for multiple platforms within the same project.
5) Creatively, VR & AR are now fully developed art forms that can radically change the way a viewer interacts with a creative execution. It’s never been more visceral and immediate. I do still wonder how it will scale audience to engage enough people to make the production cost and timeline work for brands. In that sense, AR may have a better chance than VR since there’s likely more flexibility around implementation and degrees of interaction required to move the needle. We’ve done live concert binaural recordings as well as AR sound for large live & animated installations and the effect can be really incredible. Monitoring and implementation is still a challenge in this space as is presenting VR & AR work-in-progress to clients so they “get it” without being able to really see and hear things in their final form.
