Case study: Interstellar.

Interstellar is a sci-fi film set in a dystopian future earth as well as half the film being set in space. Director Christopher Nolan tasked composer Hans Zimmer with writing the composition of the film very early on, before he had even finished the script. He also noted that he wanted complete separation from the genre of the film giving Hans only some dialogue and some context of the film, this context being that a main theme of the film being the relationship around a man and his son as well as adding some sort of religious theme of the film. Hans then went about writing the main theme of the film with hardly any context about it, this led to him having a great creative freedom when writing the theme allowing him the focus on the small themes he was given.

The final piece he wrote was a extremely progressive emotional piece that rises in tension to a magnificent build-up to a final ginormous layered organ bursting through the final section of the piece. The organ played a very important part of the composition as Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan discuss in various videos and interviews, the religious theme of the organ creates what humans represent as mankind’s attempt to portray the ethereal, mystical and unknown the themes that link very well with a sci-fi space genre which Hans of course unknowingly was initially writing for.

This very clever way of getting Hans to write for then movie was so effective and impactful that this type of genre is now in fact very heavily associated with the sci-fi space genre. Ironically as Hans wrote for a genre he was not aware of, It was in fact so effective it created what we may associate with the genre today which can be seen in other space sci-fi epics such as Ad Astra (2019) composed by Max Richter and Independence day (2016) composed by Tomas Wander.

From this research I came to the decision that the organ should be an integral part of the composition, using it as a tool in the build-up as well as final section to create a large ethereal and outer world sound. As well as this I would like to try to create as much of a build up as possible leading into a large wall of sound, However, the animation is supposedly only supposed to be around 1 minute long and from previous work with animation students I know that it is very likely that this will decrease even more as shots are cut from the animation and therefore I will try to create as much of a build up as I can within around 45 seconds long. This will be one of the toughest challenges when creating this composition.