Lindsay Wright is an English composer with a background in electronic and classical music, who now composes soundtracks for the screen. Her work for the screen spans many genres from documentaries to short fictional films to adverts, and her previous clients include HBO, BBC and British Airways, just to name a few. In her talk she walked us through three examples of her work – a documentary, a short film and her most recent EP ‘LINES’, which is her first experience of working on a project without a brief.
I found the way she explained her processes and bulletpointed what she had done very concise and helpful, and I was particularly interested by her work on the true crime programme ‘The Mystery of D.B. Cooper’, which documents the story of a still-unknown man who in 1971 booked a plane ticket under the alias ‘Dan Cooper’, and hijacked a plane full of passengers demanding a ransom of $200,000. Once he received the money he parachuted out over Washington state, never to be seen again. The documentary uses interviews of agents and bystanders who were involved in the case to tell the story, with Wright’s work playing in the background. In her talk, Wright told us how she had “tried to give each character who brought their story to the D.B. Cooper Mystery their own identity musically”. She gave us the example of a man who has walked the woods daily in Washington for 30 years and does not believe D.B. Cooper could have survived the jump and made his way out through the woods. As he is quite an outlier in the film, not really being particularly invested in the case other than wanting to give his opinion on whether or not Cooper is alive or not, Wright wanted to give his theme a mildly mysterious theme that was still inspired by a 1970’s sound that is prominent throughout the film. I found it particularly helpful that she played us through the different drafts she had made before she came to the final piece and explained why she made the choices that she did, as it really made allowed me to get a feel for her process. It was also really engaging to see her Logic Pro projects and hear the individual stems – it made me wish more lecturers had talked us through the more technical elements of their composition as it helped me relate to and understand her processes.
I don’t have much experience composing for screen, apart from for a couple of student projects for my friends, however talks such as this one in the visiting practitioner series have helped me gain a new understanding of the process, and it is something I would like to creatively explore in the sound for screen module next year. Being a very visually inspired person, I feel like it may actually be a professional route I want to explore, or at least come to appreciate better. Talks such as Wright’s, and Hollie Buhagiar’s (who I covered previously in my blog) have been really useful in finding out the processes and techniques needed to become a successful composer for screen. It seems as though it is one thing to compose a piece of sound designed to have the listener’s full attention, and another to design one that goes in tandem with a separate piece of media – the latter I would really like to experiment with!
References
- Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2016. D.B. Cooper Hijacking | Federal Bureau of Investigation. [online] Available at: <https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking> [Accessed 25 May 2022].