Mark Slater Music Message

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:36:00 GMT

<table width="550" cellpadding="20" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <tr> <td bgcolor="#FFFFFF" valign="top" style="font-size:12px;color:#000000;line-height:150%;font-family:trebuchet ms;border-left:0px solid #CC0000;border-right:0px solid #CC0000;"> Stellar Orchestrations 400 Years of the Telescope Mark Slater has picked up a Telly award, in recognition for his work on the magical and beautifully orchestrated score for <a href="http://www.400years.org">400 Years of the Telescope</a>. Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and choir, the score was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, after a month of meticulous orchestration and copying, producing over 2000 pages of music that were note perfect for the time pressured day in the studio. “Even with Sibelius and my industrial sized A3 printer this was a challenge,” says Mark Slater. “Luckily I was experienced with part preparation enough to know what lay ahead and I interviewed some student copyists in advance to take on some of the load. Of course, I had to proof read everything, but using Sibelius templates and my own house style ensured a professional finish.“ The documentary was commissioned to mark the 400th anniversary of the telescope, an invention credited to Galileo in 1609. Seduction by Light Philips Aurea Tribal DDB of New York commissioned Mark Slater to compose a score for an interactive website. The result was the award winning <a href="http://66.245.160.26/philips/aurea/">Philips Aurea: Seduction by Light</a>. Picking up both a Web Award for Best Music Site and a coveted Webby Award, the site was a finalist at Cannes Lionsgate and the Eurobest Awards, the Oscars, Golden Globe and BAFTA of the online world. Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, Mark's brief was to create a symphonic journey through the site, almost like a love story, but also had to deliver impressive sounding film music cues, to show off the flagship Ambilight Aurea screen. “I had to choose my players carefully,” Mark said, “ because I had to cover a lot of different styles of music: Action, Sci-Fi, Drama, Romance, Jazz, Contemporary Classical, so I needed flexibility. Budget was limited and I only had a single session to deliver 20 minutes of music, including stems for a special interactiv e section. In fact I only got the brief for that a few days before the session, so I was up all night composing and preparing the parts.” How-to: Templates and House Styles in Sibelius The Hollywood film score look Sibelius allows you to establish your own layout and format called House Styles. The import function is useful in applying those styles into parts and scores and it is that consistency across all the cues, smart headings, logos and good spacing, that really gives that professional big-budget feel. However not everything runs smoothly. For example, it is good practice to prepare two master scores, one for the conductor and the other for part extraction. Getting a good layout for the parts is generally the tricky thing, and some of the positioning of objects, necessary for clear parts, destroys the layout of the full score look. For film and theatre work, it is essential that the parts and scores are presented with extra clarity, eliminating page turns, bar numbers clearly visible at the start of each line, and the cue clearly marked at the top of each page. </td> </tr> </table> </tr> </td> </table>