Silence is Golden

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It’s all been a quiet on the blogging front in the last month, and, for this, I apologise.

It’s because it’s been busy busy busy here! I’ve been working on developing the upcoming shows Beyond the Front Line and They Only Come At Night trilogy with Slung Low, and scoring and sound designing a gorgeous short film with a very cool well-known actor (which, touch wood, I’m bouncing down to the final draft of as I type. Fingers crossed!). More news when it goes public.

It’s still all go here, so no lengthy debates scheduled here for the near future, but I wanted to draw your attention to Brian Satterthwaite’s recent post at SCOREcast Online: Silence is Golden. I completely agree with his assessment of the use of silence to contrast with sound, to make bold and highly effective choices in a soundtrack.

My favourite use of silence to create tension has to be in the film ‘Alien’: when Brett is looking for Jones the cat just before the Alien grabs him! Totally and utterly devoid of music for a good chunk of time – a pretty daring move, I imagine, at the time.

Very tempting to put in a low drone or scares here and there in the moment, high tremolo strings perhaps. But no, the braver choice was made, and the scene is all the more effective because of it.

I’ll be writing on the SCOREcast Online site towards the end of the month. Reading some of the other posts… got a lot to live up to! Best get on with it then!