Hero - Short Film Score - Walkthrough Pt.6 - M1 (Part 4)

Welcome to the next part of this walkthrough. All the previous parts of this series are available here. We're getting near the end for this first cue with this part.

As usual, the entire track plus score sheet is attached at the bottom of this post. The scene without music is available here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGX-aUMquBA 

Bars 47-59

The spotting notes that I had for this sequence were:

• 01:24:07 shots
• 01:25:17 dead serious (brothers theme?)
• 01:28:11 building to a fever pitch
• 01:34:09 build up shortly before, emphasize jump
• 01:34:23 emphasize, more important
• 01:35:09 final sound

Again, as you can see, there are a lot of things to accent in a very short time frame. Notice how in this sequence, there are a few small tempo changes that were necessary to hit certain following hit points. In such a rapid tempo and between sections, such small tempo changes are usually not noticeable and also not a problem to record. In fact the live players will make this change even smoother as they will not mechanically all lock in exactly on the new tempo at once but create a natural "transition". Of course, this only works in a reasonable range until either the tempo change will become clearly noticeable or the players will struggle locking into the new tempo spontaneously.

Scene wise we're coming out of the dialogue between the two brothers with the younger brother saying "Watch and learn" and heading off.

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/hero-m1-b47-59/s-jJwdLfeBFUO 

A timpani solo in bar 47 portrays the shots that are being fired. Personally, I really like timpani soli like this as they always create a very nice contrast and still can create a really nice high energy impression. For tuning reasons but also to make it most impactful, it is essential to not use too many different pitches (in this case three) in such a solo.

The younger brother hitting the floor falls nicely on the downbeat of bar 48. I found it appropriate to also use a tubular bell on the downbeat as sort of "death bell". As you can see in the spotting notes, there was an idea to use the main theme in this section which however I didn't do in the end for two reasons. The first and more obvious one was that the time frame of one bar was just too small to create any useful statement of the theme. The second reason was more of a storytelling reason: The theme is a love theme between the brothers that I tried to use to portray their relationship „in reality“. This scene is a game and quoting the theme here would take away from the seriousness of it.

Bar 49 and 50 are the "build up to a fever pitch". From the story telling it had to serve two purposes. The first one was to build up towards the next section and secondly to take some sort of emotionality and "planning revenge" into account.

Harmonically, we're coming from an E minor tonality switching to a C/E in this section with a lydian #11 (f#). This progression is a quite common harmonic trope for "heroism" used in many scores over the laste decades. It is followed by an inversion of Cmaj7/G and a D7/F# leading back to Em in 51. The D7 chord includes the note G which creates a bit of a nice rub in this harmony.

In the strings there is some contrapuntal witing going on with two dominating motifs. There is an upwards 4 16th note motif and a motif of two eights notes followed by a quarter note. I felt that this "interweaving" of musical ideas gave this section some emotional quality of the  "hero building up courage" as well as the constant upwards motion of all the lines.

The next passage again is a brief action sequence that is supposed to have a heroic tone to it. Harmonically it picks up again that idea of Em going to C/E and then C/G. When the hero aims at the villian and shoots, the harmony shifts again to the more ominous "signature harmony" that opened the cue already which is Abm/G (bar 54) resolving to Abm/Cb in 55.

Notice that there is a lot of "chromatic sidestepping" happening in the brass. Particularly the triplet figures almost always do a chromatic sidestep downwards on their second note. In bar 51 we see Em-D#m-Em. I used this to create some harmonic interest and steer away from too "clear" chords. These moments somewhat prepare the more "prominent" fanfare in bar 54 which again sidesteps from Abm to Gm and back. These moments don't act as actual chord change but rather as colorizations of the existing harmony. Of course the longer you stay on the sidestepped harmony, the more it will become necessary for our ear to justify it harmonically but if you only use these chords very briefly they will pass without our ear being disturbed by them.

Rhythmically, I went for two distinctive layers with one being that triplet feeling that we have in the brass/low strings and the other one being a 16th based ostinato in the high strings and woodwinds. Due to them being texturally very different, they are actually perceived as two layers. If you put them texturally and registrally too close to each other there would be a noticeable wonkyness to the rhythm (which can be desired as well). Personally, I always try to make ostinatos a bit more interesting than just using super small repeating "cells". In this case I alternate between staccato and legato which in my opinion gives more colour than playing this whole passage staccato.

In bar 54, the bass register hits the downbeat but leaves the rest of the bar free. I personally feel this creates a more intense highlight on that bar and creates variety to the pounding of the bass rhythm that we had in the bars before that.

In bar 55 the bass enters again with a Cb which now creates a gateway to the new tonality. You can notice that there was no pivot chord or anything that really prepared that key change, yet this rather spontaneous modulation works quite effectively. 

The just established Abm again is moved in the chord progression that we already had two times in that sequence. This time it goes to Fb/Ab or to make it a bit more simple to read E/G#.

We establish a pedal point of Ab over which the chord of Fbmaj7, Gb and again Fb move. This creates of course a heroic lydian quality with the hero seemingly having defeated all the bad guys. Notice the Cb in the strings in bar 58 which again is that added fourth to the chord of Gb which we already had in a smiliar way in bar 50. From the big idea this sequence is quite similar to bars 49 and 50 with an upwards expanding rather contrapuntal development. Something like this somehow always has the feeling of "the resolution after battle" for me. I'm not entirely sure where it comes from but it might be John Williams' fault again where a sequence like this https://youtu.be/EtZx8wN0CO4?t=255 is used in similar filmic context and which served as inspiration for this part.