Danny Daneau
Director
Our brilliant composer, Kristin Øhrn Dyrud, has released a few wonderful tracks from the EP of her new band, Postulat. Here is her message:
My new band Postulat recorded an EP last fall, and we have posted some of our songs on Myspace. Have a listen if you want and if you have a MySpace page we would be very happy if you friend request us!
Thanks, Kristin
Please visit Kristin’s page by clicking here. Help spread the word.
Kristin Øhrn Dyrud
Composer
Second Part in a Series. Read Part 1.
Danny was very clear early in the process that he felt it was important to make this a silent score. We kept removing elements and stripping down the cues until only what was needed remained. There are cues in this movie that have 15 seconds of rests in them. There is something very uneasy with music not coming in when you expect it to. 
We also had extreme dynamic ranges so that when the loud and scary moments happen in the film they seem even more powerful because of the contrasts to all the silence. Danny talked about having the music reflect the terrifying loneliness the characters are faced with. Scott Uhlfelder’s cinematography especially in the landscape scenes already reflects this and I tried to underline this by playing with open intervals, long rests, sliding strings and so on.
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All the preparations that I did on beforehand allowed me to do the actual scoring very quickly. From the time I received the final cut until we had recorded the score, there had only been 4 weeks. But this would have been much harder if I hadn’t had the chance to let the movie and the ideas mature gradually over time. The fact that I had a fantastic team, including violist Hillary Thomas who recorded string effects for demo purposes, copyist Matt Novack, conductor Susie Bench, engineers Alex Levin and Paul Apelgren, and of course the fantastic musicians (Nancy Roth, viola, Armen Ksajikian, cello and Karl Vincent, contrabass) made this not only much smoother, but also possible. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Danny, who is an incredibly talented filmmaker, and his wonderful team. I hope to get a chance to do it again very soon!
Learn more about Kristin by visiting her website: www.kristindyrud.com
Kristin Øhrn Dyrud
Composer
Part 1: The Beginning
Working on The Attic Door as a composer has been an incredibly rewarding experience. I was brought on board in the summer of 2007 when a mutual filmmaker friend brought Danny and me together. I was introduced to the story through communicating with Danny over email and reading the script. As the editing process started a few months later, I got the chance to watch different evolving versions of the film. After watching the first cut I spent a whole week, partially in a cold and quiet loft in Norway, which seemed to be a good environment to try to get underneath the skin of this movie. I focused solely on the film and its dramatic and emotional content without thinking of music at all. I felt it was crucial to understand the film 110 % to be able to come up with the right musical concept later. I had the luxury of time to do this and wanted to take full advantage of it. So I spent my time reflecting and doing research such as listening to a lot of contemporary music (Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Stephen Scott, John Cage) and watching movies with unusual scores (There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men).
Continue Reading »
Danny Daneau
Director
I am proud to announce that the score for our film is complete! Our composer, Kristin Øhrn Dyrud, did such an amazing job creating a complex and wonderful soundtrack. I cannot tell you how proud I am. The following video was from our scoring session on May 17th, 2008 at Stewart Levin Productions.
Danny Daneau
Director
Our music composer, Kristin Øhrn Dyrud, arrived back in her home country of Norway yesterday to find a nice little write up in the local paper. The article talks about Kristin’s career as a film composer and her work on our film! See the small picture below for a sample. We will try to get the text from the magazine and translate it for the blog readers rusty on their Norwegian Bokm�l.
Erica Harrell
Producer
In today’s blog I am proud to introduce our composer, Kristin Øhrn Dyrud. Kristin came to the film from a recommendation from colleague filmmakers Aaron King and Debby Wolfe, who had both worked with her on their most recent film projects. Kristin is from Norway and spent December working on our film from halfway across the world. Danny and I even were able to video chat with Kristin, again proving the usefulness of the iChat to A Monster in the Attic. She is now back in Los Angeles and will soon meet Danny in person for the first time!
Kristin finds influences from a wide range of music – everything from Bach, Rachmaninov, Grieg and Stravinsky to Bjork, Imogen Heap, Madonna, Ella Fitzgerald, Alison Krauss, and Lily Allen. Of film composers, she loves the work of Alexandre Desplat, John Powell, Christopher Young, Nicholas Hooper, Jon Brion and Thomas Newman, to mention a few.
Kristin had this to say about inspiration: “I get tremendously inspired by composers who incorporate everyday sounds in their music. Like Bjork, who made a whole song based on sounds from a basketball court. I also find inspiration in literature, abstract paintings, photography, nature, the sounds that surround me.”
For the Monster in the Attic score, Kristin was delighted to be brought into the process so early in the process. She gave herself plenty of time to sit with the film in order to truly understand our characters and their journey. Danny and Kristin decided that there would be very few instruments in the score, but those would be utilized in as many different – and sometimes unconventional – ways as possible.
More from Kristin after the jump:
