Powell
John Powell, whose credits include popular animated films as "Shrek", "Happy Feet" and "Kung Fu Panda," returned for that arena with music for one of the best reviewed films of the year, "how to train your Dragon"."I like animation because I find that don't get to write music joyful in live action movies," he says. "Really joyful music is something like doing, and in the animation there are so many moments of more when you can truly enable that."
In "Dragon", there are several: Viking when guy Hiccup ascends first with his friend Dragon toothless, and later when Astrid joins them in glorious flight.
"Directors left room for music," says. "They knew that was going to have an emotional impact."
Powell says that he was trying to "a kind of greatness, a little more symphonic" most animated movies.And DreamWorks Animation honcho Katzenberg loves melodies are easy-to-grasp, explains; accessible songs are a must, too.
The theatrics grand-scale "Dragon" asked a 110-piece London Orchestra and chorus, but many of his quieter moments reveal exotic elements that are surprisingly personal for the composer. Because the setting is an ancient land of Viking, Powell studied music Nordic and found that he had much in common with the Celtic music. Also, many of the characters of the film sported Scottish accents.
"The truth is that the Vikings did live in the northern parts of Scotland," observes Powell. "My grandmother was from North Uist, which is one of the Hebrides (off the North coast of Scotland), so family-wise that are still very Scottish ". So the Celtic colors of flute, hardanger fiddle and warpipes (bagpipes) appear throughout the score.
Scottish pipes formed a special challenge: "you can play on a scale, a key," Powell says. "There's really very little that you can do.You certainly couldn't put a piper in with an orchestra;are a tool incredibly strong.They scare people. "So when Powell recorded 20 of them at once, "we all had earplugs."
"Dragon" was by far the biggest films of Powell this year."Fair Game," the fact-based drama about outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, marks his fourth film with Director Doug Liman ("The Bourne Identity"), and was a very different experience.
"I just wrote pieces and sent to him," without regard to the specifications of the film, says Powell.Liman used snippets of music, which includes guitar, strings and odd, electronically processed percussive sounds ("shaky" impulses things, he says).
"Are two different movies," says Powell. "One taken every inch of my ability to work with the image, as carefully as I could, and the other took my skills of Zen to disconnect from the film and write what the Director described. If both ends of the spectrum of composition for film at the moment, so this year I really went to both. "More articles from eye on the Oscars: music preview
Photos revisit composers | Scoring docs a difficult balancing act | Hans Zimmer | Trent Reznor | A.R. Rahman | John Powell | Elliot GoldenthalContact Newsroom varieties at news@variety.com
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