Scoring A WAR WITHIN - Part 2: Concept & Theme

It has been a while since I wrote the first part of walkthrough about the feature film I did in 2018. Nevertheless it is time to catch up on this and talk about the concept and the thematic material of the score.

As I've written quite a few times before, I'm a big fan of strong musical concepts for scores. If you have a concept and the thematic material in place, this is in my opinion already half of the work that needs to be done for the score.

When going through the temp tracks that were used for this score, they all had a lot of "textural" qualities. There were morphing synth textures, evolving orchestral textures etc. It was relatively clear that it was not necessary to bring in a full symphonic line up for this score. The colours and world that is being created in the movie didn't warrant a colorful symphonic score with lots of flourishes etc. Additionally, the movie had a lot of scenes that were quite intimate, in the confined space of the house with subtle emotional changes and an almost claustrophobic quality while other parts of the movie had some grand scale moments like a war scene, boat shots on sea, plane scenes and general more large scale visuals.

So it felt like it was necessary to be able to switch the scope of the score without losing integrity between the cues. The general idea was to base the sound largely on strings and add some brass in the climax of the score to really have some headroom in the sound and scope of the score for these important final scenes.

Fortunately, I have recorded quite alot in Prague before and knew the studio and its sound very well. I also knew there as a small adjacent room to the main hall which I used before as vocal and drum booth. It was actually the old control room so it had some acoustic treatment. My idea was to create a range between intimate sound and grand scale by using solistic strings as well as a large string orchestra (plus some flutes, harp, piano). So I came up with the idea to place a string quartet in the solo booth additional to the large string section in the main hall so I can work with the ultra intimate focus of this solo ensemble as well as the lush sound of the big section and use these colours as needed. The decision to not put the solo strings also in the main studio was to be able to have these solos completely under control sound wise and be able to treat them differently which wouldn't have been possible if they were in the same room as the rest of the orchestra. Also, this small room sound of the solo booth added to the effect of making some of the cues very small and intimate.

I also wanted to rely exclusively on acoustic sounds without any additional synths or percussion and wanted to create seemingly synthetic and "morphing" textures by gradually changing playing techniques like sul ponticello->sul tasto etc.

So besides the string quartet, we had a large string orchestra of 14/12/10/8/6, 3 Flutes, 1 Piano, 1 Harp and for the climax we additionally had 8 Horns, 4 Trombones and a Tuba.

I felt that with this concept in place, I had enough room to cover all of the emotional "space" of the movie as well as a specific enough sound to tie all cues acoustically together.

Another decision that was made quite early was that the sound format for the movie was going to be Dolby Atmos and we decided that we want the music to also be in Dolby Atmos having reflections of the room sound also coming from the top and not only from the back.

We specifically set up 4 microphones above the conductor that were pointing towards the ceiling of the studio to capture these reflections. This decision also allowed us to play with the "size of the sound" which increased the range between super close, intimate, in your face solo strings and room filling lush string orchestra sound for the grand scale moments.

This indeed worked out very well in the final mix of the movie. Unfortunately, the Atmos Mix didn't make it to the Blu-Ray that was released but at least in a few cinemas people got to hear it.

As I wrote in the last part, there were quite a few versions of the "Main Theme" for that movie that were mostly written before principal shooting and were considerably more romantic and uplifting. After the shooting and the first edits it was clear that it needed a more bittersweet theme. I tried out a few different things which didn't quite work until I came up with the main theme in its eventual state:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/a-war-within-main-theme-piano/s-jFU915unAIY

I wanted to sharpen the profile of that theme a bit more into not being the generic "main theme" but actually attach it to something in the movie that would make sense dramaturgically. So this theme became the theme for the family and home, both things that the main character was dearly missing while being at war and is ultimately willing to sacrifice in the movie.

The relatively special quality of that theme is that it doesn't really have a tonal center. It moves in a cadence of I-iii-II-VI (or alternatively if the last chord of these cadences is understood as I: bIII-v-IV-I). In any case, the tonal center (whichever you hear as such) is not present for long before it modulates a fourth upwards in the third repetition of that cadence. It also has this odd 13 bar structure consisting of five arcs. I consciously was looking for something that  had a bittersweet quality and something that was sounding "harmonic for the audience" but at the same time felt somehow odd. To stretch the interpretation of this even further the lack of a root tonality resembles the feeling of lost roots for the main character though I have to admit that this specific connection was not intentional but of course makes a great story for music nerds.

However, it was definitely intentional to keep that theme somehow open and feeling unresolved to reflect the emotional uncertainty of the movie in the music.

From a melodic standpoint, it is a relatively simple and melody with a quite simple rhythmical model that keeps repeating. It is almost like a small lullaby which I felt to be appropriate for the feeling of home and family. Additionally, I went for a lot of 9-8 resolutions that create this sort of bittersweetness that this theme also needed.

The theme has its first appearance after about 15 minutes in the movie, when the protagonist returns back home from war. We see a sequence with drone shots of the boat that brings him home and into the harbor of his home town where he is greeted by his family. Already at his arrival there seems to be an odd distance mixed within the warm welcome between him and his family so the music never reaches a clear emotional peak of the return.

The score sheet for that cue is attached at the bottom of this post, the recording is available at:

https://soundcloud.com/robin-hoffmann/love-theme

Besides the main theme there are some secondary themes and motifs that keep reappearing thoughout the score, for instance a motivic idea for the antagonist as well as a theme for the protagonists's friend and his wife who share a secondary storyline.