Stephen Gallagher. Photo:
An area of Aotearoa New Zealand arts getting major global reach right now is music and sound for film.
Culture 101 brought together three composers and musicians making inroads in this field to talk about how they make the remarkable work they do: Moniker’s Sam Flynn Scott, Lachlan Anderson and Stephen Gallagher.
The reach doesn’t get much bigger. August saw the debut of the animated feature Saving Bikini Bottom, based on the television series SpongeBob SquarePants. On its premiere weekend it got 12.8 million views and 13.4 million views in its second week, making it Netflix's number one overall title.
Bikini Bottom’s music is composed by Wellington-based group Moniker, which includes The Phoenix Foundation’s Luke Buda, Conrad Wedde and Flynn Scott.
Sam Flynn Scott Photo: supplied
Moniker has previously done the soundtracks for everything from Boy to Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
This December sees the premiere of another blockbuster with Kiwi involvement: the Warner Brothers anime The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
The soundtrack is by Stephen Gallagher, who has composed for many short films and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
As a music editor he has worked on Avatar and District 9, and won an Emmy Award for his sound work on Sir Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back.
Like Flynn Scott, Lachlan Anderson is probably best known for his band - he’s the bassist for Die! Die! Die! But Anderson has increasingly become busy with screen work.
He scored the soundtrack to David Farrier's documentary Mister Organ, another Netflix series Tabula Rasa, The Deadlands and the groundbreaking, Emmy-winning drama Rūrangi.
Lachlan Anderson Photo: supplied
His latest is the soundtrack to Grafted, an Aotearoa take on the body horror genre that premiered in the Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival. It’s now in cinemas nationally.
Lachlan Anderson told Culture 101 a music effect during an early part of Grafted was inspired by an electric fan, and made from layering many sounds.
"There's a lot of different sounds. You can hear strings, there's a lot of warped instruments that have been distorted and played backwards and completely destroyed.
"But one of the main ... pulses of that scene is that there's a fan that's playing in the background ... like the diegetic in the background. We were watching the scene, and we didn't have music down [yet], and just the fan alone was quite upsetting, so we really leaned into it ... and it just builds up to this big crescendo.
For the documentary Mister Organ, Anderson said he created an acoustic box out of junk pieces, to make mechanical sounds, riffing off the abstract idea of a person behind the scenes pulling at the strings.
"When I dive into a film I love picking a concept - I mean, we all probably do this - picking a small sort of thing and just going all-in on it.
"Especially with horror, you don't have to play behind the dialogue as much as other dramas, you can create a lot of atmosphere.
For this interview, Flynn Scott chose a track from the Saving Bikini Bottom focus group: "It's very SpongeBob-ian."
"It needed to sound like a Hollywood movie, but it needed to have elements and cues and an atmosphere that tied back to the original cartoon - and the original cartoon was a lot of production music from the 60s.
"This is one of the tracks that's most inspired by that kind of production music - and I think you'll hear it."
"Tracks like that, we wanted it to be really fun, and as ridiculous as possible - and we couldn't be too ridiculous. There was no way to make something that they would come back and said 'this is too ridiculous'.
"So we could go crazy, and we were just wanting to imagine what would the orchestras have been like in Hollywood in 1965. There would have been a theremin player, there would have been someone with a bag of harmonicas, there would have been some singers there who could do a little clapping chorus in the bridge or whatever. It was just imagining a different world I guess."
