Apollo 11: Crafting the Score
Apollo 11: Crafting the Score
In early March 2018 I attended a screening of Apollo 11 and was absolutely floored. Todd Douglas Miller had crafted an incredibly visceral and compelling account of the moon landing, using newly unearthed and restored footage from the NASA archives. But as much as I loved the movie what I loved even more was the score. I was also incredibly intrigued by a note in the end of the credits saying all the music was recorded only on instruments contemporary to the film's 1969 setting.
So intrigued that I reached out the composer, Matt Morton, and asked if we could do an interview about this decision, and how he managed to pull it all off.
Conducting the interview did present some challenges, however. Matt was located in Ohio, and I was located in Toronto, so we were going to have to figure out a way to conduct the interview remotely. Originally I figured we’d simply do a “double-ender”, and record the interview over Skype. I’d take a screen recording of Matt’s end, and he’d record a high-quality version of his audio, send that to me which I’d stitch together to the Skype video and just work from that. Thankfully, Matt’s a bit of a gear-head, and he had some prosumer video equipment on hand. He attached a GoPro to his computer, and recorded the entire interview using the GoPro as his main camera instead of the webcam on his computer. This meant that I had both a high quality video source and high quality audio source to edit from.
Matt also happened to be pretty good about documenting his experimentation process during the making of the score and provided me with hours of behind the scenes footage of him setting up the Moog, experimenting, and even recording actual cues heard in the final score (excerpts of which are all featured in the piece).
So while the end result might look a little different from our usual Studio 9 interviews we produce at TIFF, we were able to create an original piece that dug deep into the making of this incredible and unique film score.
Client: TIFF
Producer/Editor: Adam Schoales
During the interview process I asked Matt if he could walk us through the various layers that make up one of the cues. While only a short portion of that walkthrough made it into the piece, you can watch the entire walkthrough for the “Transearth Injection” cue here. Best enjoyed with headphones to experience the full stereo effects.
The interview was later picked up and republished on Uncrate, Laughing Squid, Milan Records, and Synthtopia. These two features are also now available on the UK Blu-ray release from Dogwoof.