Early on we decided that we wanted to limit the amount of instruments in the score. Financially it made sense as we were working on a relatively tight budget, but that wasn’t the main reason. The characters in the story are forced to utilize their available resources to their maximum in order to survive. Having very few instruments that were being used in all possible ways would reflect this. I also think I work more creatively when I have limitations. Especially since this film didn’t have much temp music at all, I had to come up with everything from scratch, which sometimes is a pretty daunting task.

You can check out some never before heard music tracks from the film’s soundtrack and read the full article here.

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.

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.

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

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).

Then I started working out ideas that I presented to Danny and our producer Erica. The first round of ideas demonstrated how we could maximize the instruments to create as full of a sound as possible, whereas the second round was focused on how to do as much as possible dramatically with as few musical elements as possible. We ended up steering away from a lot of the ideas that were created during this period, but one of the ideas that we stuck with was the decision to limit the sound to four instruments only and that we wanted to use these instruments in every possible way. The idea was to represent how Caroline and Darrell utilize the natural resources surrounding them in order to survive. Interesting and creative solutions happen when you set limitations for yourself, which is what we strove for. I chose the viola, cello, contrabass and piano because of their timbre and versatility. The idea of writing a string based score without having a single violin seemed attractive to me because it was something I had never done before. And I felt that the sound of the lower strings better represented the story of the film. The piano was also great because some of the non traditional effects such as fish line bowing, rubbing and hitting the strings inside the instrument created unique colors that well accompanied the dramatic content of the scary scenes (listen to the example below). My goal was to make as organic of a score as possible, so there are no effects other than what naturally comes from the instruments.

Learn more about Kristin by visiting her website: www.kristindyrud.com

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.

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.

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:

“Darrell and Caroline have to do with the limited resources around them. So I had to choose versatile instruments that would be able to convey the core emotions of the film. I started playing with textures and melodic ideas and put a lot of time into doing research on the chosen instruments. I went to a concert with Stephen Scott”s Bowed Piano Ensemble to listen to ways of utilizing the piano in unconventional ways which resulted in me buying fish lines to use as bows for my piano. I”ve bought records with Edgar Meyer who is a fantastic bass player. I listened to a lot of different music as well as reading about orchestration for the specific instruments chosen. So far I”ve written about ten minutes of music which represent some of my ideas for the overall sound of the film.”

“With the rare luxury of having a lot of time, I get the chance of intellectualizing along the way. This allows me to see and utilize all the material and hopefully that”ll be something that will benefit the score. So for now I will continue my research and playing around with ideas until the actual tailoring begins in April.”

We are very excited to have Kristin on our film and to share with you a little bit more about her process. Check out her website and some examples of her work here.