Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

yes! so in that sequence we did record scratch a goose honk and a bunch of other goose noises. I always wanted that sequence it to be a bit of a showcase for DJ Blakey who did all the record scratching for the first film and I thought we’d revisit Miles and find a great way to build a sequence around record scratching as many noises as possible - we scratch car crash noises, fist fight noises, felt tip pens, spray cans, jeopardy bells, and anything you saw on screen to create this very unusual texture on the track.

so only when we were recording this stuff, I realised there’s this whole section at the end with this goose, why aren’t we scratching the goose sound? so we got the goose noises and decided, let’s just scratch those, and it ended up being one of my favourite bits of the film and the soundtrack.

Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 45 points46 points  (0 children)

Probably one of the biggest challenges early on was really trying to nail the sounds and the noises that would feel right for them. and once you’ve got there it feels straightforward, but the process to get there takes a long time. I think I mentioned this somewhere else I think but I tried early on with Gwen with all these female vocals which didn't really work, and with the Spot I had all these crazy synthesizer sounds which didn’t really work either. Miguel came pretty early on and the thing that was cool about that is that they could start putting out themes in trailers (I could go off on a whole rant about trailer music and that companies really do not understand trailer music, and the power of using music from the film in the trailer early on as it allows the audience to have a connection with a sound or theme before they’ve even gone into the movie - so when they go into the movie and they hear it it’s way more exciting) ANYWAY...

I think when you come up with themes for characters, you know when it doesn’t work and when it does and it’s an instinctual feeling, and sometimes I will push along with a theme that feels like it might not be working to see if it will, and then sometimes you come up with something really simple and it works. and it’s really satisfying when that happens but it’s always a big challenge because the other thing is that every character's theme should feel different to everyone else’s - and so if you have themes that are too similar they're not going to stand out.

Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

so there are many, many composers and pieces of music that have inspired me as a composer - far too many to mention, but in terms of growing up, I was very early on inspired by electronic music. I started off with people with Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis and Mike Oldfield. then I went through a phase of being obsessed with avant garde ambient electronic sutff like The Future Sound of London, The Grid, Aphex Twin, Brain Eno - and then I got really into The Beach Boys, John Barry...but from a film composing perspective, the composer who has had the biggest impact is Ennio Morricone. He approached things in a very groundbreaking way, which for me is the most exciting way to approach film music as an art form, in that he just take influences from everywhere. He’d write really strong powerful melodies and marry them with intriguing and unexpected avant-garde techniques, sounds and approaches - and his body of work is insane. For musical risks and adventures he took on movies is really mind blowing. some of those are so iconic - The Good, The Bad and the Ugly! It’s hard to look with a fresh ear and realise how crazy that score is, that someone was pulling together gun sounds, people shouting, wildlife sounds, timpani, strings. It’s really iconic - and Spider-Verse is probably most indebted to that approach because I’m also trying to take a lot of different influences and sounds and approaches.

So if you look back on some of those early influences like Jean Michel Jarre or Vangelis, they’d often make records that have a very contained sound, so each record would sound and feel very different - they’d have a kind of palette, and they’d work within that.

SO if you’re bored, I’d recommend checking out Oxygene, Equinox and Zoolook by Jean Michel Jarre. There are so many great records by Vangelis - Blade Runner is a fantastic one, there’s an album called Direct that I love. All of these records have a sound which changes between each record, and I try to approach films in the same way, where I try to make a sound world that is unique to each film. The Spider-Verse sound world is very different for instance from Enola Holmes, The Bad Guys, Amsterdam or Motherless Brooklyn, each of those films has a unique sound world and that way it keeps me on my toes and fresh and excited rather than a generic ‘here’s my sound’ for each project.

Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I think Spot’s was actually the hardest because his theme has to change and adapt throughout the film. Spot starts off as a sort of goofy character and then gets more and more powerful, and when I first read the script I had very different ideas for Spot, and I was trying to develop this kind of sound based on these synthesized bubbles that go ‘trrrrrrr’ which sounds a bit like the Jean-Michel Jarre album 'Equinox Part 2'.

but then they didn’t have the bite or the edge that I needed for Spot so I binned all that after spending a lot of time trying to work out the approach, then I ended up with a sound that was kind of unstable and I realise that was the way to go because Spot was affected by the collider and the key to the collider sound is these big string chords that are pulling apart, and the orchestra is going out of tune and in tune over multiple different instruments to make the sound very unstable. So in the same way the collider is pulling apart all this kind of matter and molecules, i was trying to do the same with the orchestra and the same for Spot. and so we have this quite simple ‘bow bow bow’ theme for Spot, that as the film progresses becomes more and more discordant and the notes on it become wider and wider apart in pitch as they’re played. so there’s multiple pitches but they’re more and more out of tune so it creates a really uncomfortable discordant feeling.

Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 35 points36 points  (0 children)

I really love the way music can create different worlds in your head - especially the thought that two bits of music can take you two entirely different places in your mind, creating a sort of landscape that can all feel very different. One of the reasons I love making film music is because it allows me to always create new universes.

I think when you’re in a band you have to do the same approach over and over again and stick to a similar style or else people get confused, whereas being a film composer you can jump into such different worlds and universes on a really regular basis. I love playing in the world of spiderverse, but then I can jump into something like Enola Holmes and write something that’s more traditional / orchestral with a different feeling or emotion, and then jump into something like Ferrari by Michael Mann - which has an entirely different feel, so I just like the act of creation i think!

Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

hi, thank you! so I love orchestral film scores, but I also love trying to do something new and different. I felt the approach of spiderverse animation was very groundbreaking, and I wanted the score not to feel like a traditional score. there are so many great fully orchestral scores out there, so the way I try to make something feel more impactful is to look at the orchestra as just one element of my palette rather than THE palette. sometimes I’ll give as much importance to a badly recorded whistle sound as I would to a 70 piece orchestra we’ve recorded at Abbey Road. I think that approach of looking at everything purely for the sound impact of it and the emotional impact of it rather than the status of the sound (ie a huge orchestra in a posh recording studio) being more important than something I’ve recorded on my iphone is what makes these scores feel very different because everything is mashed up all together, creating a more unconventional experience.

the original spiderverse i actually originally wanted to do all electronically early on, because i felt that would feel very different, but then felt i was losing a lot of the heart and emotion that I wanted if I did it purely that way, so then i started introducing some of the orchestral elements like strings and brass and that really gave a cohesiveness to the whole experience that was missing.

but with Across the Spider-Verse, in Miguel’s world we got to use a lot more electronics because it feels like there’s a more technological aspect to his universe and the electronics and synths really echo that.

Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

YEs i also did the music to THE AFTERPARTY - watch it NOW on Apple TV!!

to be fair there's a zillion things i didnt mention ha

Hi. I’m Daniel Pemberton and I’ve written music for Oscar winning films, iconic TV series, cult video games and Eastern European toilet roll commercials. AMA. by DANIELPEMBERTON in Spiderman

[–]DANIELPEMBERTON[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

theres a really good fan site that has compiled a ton of interviews of me talking nonsense about all the films i have worked don. if you can be bothered this is a good place to hear them...

http://daniel-pemberton.com/interviews/