The beast of a show that is Flood, Part 3: To The Sea was filmed last week. It’ll be broadcast in mid-August on BBC2, and now it’s in post-production.
I’m still unpacking what I’ve learned from the experience and all the memories from those few months of scoring the show and working on-site with a flipping brilliant gang of fellow theatre-makers.
The score has been an intriguing and enlightening hybrid of my theatre and film work. For example: the show plays from beginning to end, like theatre eg NT Live; unlike film or television, where we would film a scene or a section repeatedly with several takes. The music and sound is cued live and the actors can hear it and can react to it. However, we do have a contingency: once the film is edited together there’s still a small opportunity to edit the music to fit, but hopefully there won’t need to be much of that. Touch wood.
The fidelity of the music is higher for broadcast than it is for little radio receivers that the live audience usually wears for Slung Low‘s shows. So I’ve allowed the music to have a greater dynamic range (the quiets are quieter and the louds are louder) than I normally would, and there’s more intricacy in places that I know will be heard. There’s also lots more bass!
Now that Part 3 is in the can and off to post-production, it’s easier to take bird’s-eye view of the whole of Flood so far – the trailer, the short online film, the play on water in April earlier this year and this, latest instalment. Thematic development on this show has been an absolute joy! I’ve developed motifs for Gloriana, the woman from the sea with extra-human powers, and referenced the Love Song – ‘Look Across The Ocean’ – all over the place. In Part 2 it was a song first known only to two of the older characters, memories of their time together many years ago. Now it’s transmuted into a talisman of the strength and value of love in itself and as a way to power us into a future worth living for.
At least, that’s how I read it. Maybe you’ll hear something similar when you watch it on BBC2 in August. Date tbc..