After watching through Fare Thee Well a few times I had a few ideas about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with the film. From what I took from the film was that the character is a loner and he’s interested in the military, history, war or just Napoleon Bonaparte.
I wanted to try and incorporate both of these points into the score I made so I thought the right sort of music for the film would be military based so marching drums and brass instruments. I started by looking online for videos of people performing these pieces and quite quickly I found people playing marching snare solos. I really liked these pieces as I felt they fit the two things I really noticed in the film. I felt the solo instrument resonated with emphasising the characters loneliness and the snare fit with the military/war theme running throughout the film.
My main influence for how I’d go about using music in the film came from the film Birdman. The score by Antonio Sanchez is made up of mainly solo drum pieces with the occasional inclusion of long sustained notes. I didn’t want to copy his style of drumming I just like how the music is used at times when the character is stressed to help emphasise how he is feeling. This was what I wanted to do with the score.
Antonio Sanchez – The Anxious Battle for Sanity – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq_0vn1TNP8
To start making this piece I looked at different styles of military music and what tempos they were at. At first I wanted to make something that would have been used in Napoleon’s wars but as they were a lot larger in terms of instrumentation I opted to do something more like American marching band drum solos.
School Drum Off – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTsvjXYDwQQ