One of the best, if not THE BEST, movie composers, John Williams, turns 80 today. Though the article suggests 5 scores of his to listen to, there are TONS more. Like Indiana Jones music, ET, Superman (original), Catch Me If You Can (which has a great saxophone part done by Dan Higgins), Saving Private Ryan….just to name a FEW.
Wiki him. He has pretty much shaped music in movies since the 70s.
Barry composer of the classic James Bond theme died today. It’s impossible to imagine James Bond without it’s signature theme, but that almost happened.
“Shortly after this Barry would receive the fateful phone call from Bond producer Harry Saltzman. “I got a phone call from Harry,” recalled Barry in a 2006 article in the Telegraph. “He never used to come down to the recording sessions, and he says: ‘John, that is the worst fucking song I ever heard in my life. We open in three weeks’ time, otherwise I’d take that fucking song out of the picture. I’d take it out! Out!’”
Here are some other themes he did, like Dances With Wolves.
Another good link about John Barry.
Ok, this is a total ad for ProTools, but it is highly interesting. Such gems as that when they did music for Titanic, they had 2 tons of outboard gear. On Avatar? Just one Mac Pro. Amazing.
Avatar — Avid Audio is the Avatar for Groundbreaking New Soundtrack from Avid on Vimeo.
Great video of Hans Zimmer and how he scored “The Dark Knight”
Philip Bloom visited the Skywalker Ranch and did this great video of the place. Very cool stuff. Here is another link to it.
Skywalker Ranch from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
Don LaFontaine, the man who provided the sonorous voice for more than 5,000 movie trailers, died Monday at age 68. LaFontaine was known as the “king of the movie trailers,” having done the trailer voiceovers for films such as Terminator, Fatal Attraction, Cheaper by the Dozen, Batman Returns and his personal favourite, The Elephant Man.
Yeah, I know, not really saxophone related, but this guys voice was amazing.
KongisKing.net has a couple of interesting videos about the post production of the new King Kong movie. Of interest are the post production movies of weeks 4 and 5.
Amazing that he does about 2 minutes of music a day, and then the copyists come in at like 4am to write out parts for the orchestra to play in the morning. Also amazing the amount of Macintoshes used 😉 Also of note is that it appears that Finale is used, by the look of a couple of the pieces of music in the videos, specifically in the Week 4 video, about 4:21 into it. Looks like Finale using Bill Duncan’s Finale Fonts