Is Cinema Dead? - Chapter - 28- MUSIC - the film's EMOTION

In August 2015 after I locked the editing I started to look for a music composer, we decided that we would go for an original scored music.

I posted that I was looking for a music composer in a facebook group called Film Network Ireland which had at that time more than 20 000 members, I posted it to another filmmaker facebook group too. I decided to do a casting for musicians and film composers. When I was approached in direct messaging on facebook I explained to everyone what the idea of the film was , what kind of production we were, I said to everyone that we are a micro-budget indie film. I sent to all of them our not official trailer which was also with temp music which I placed inside the film just to show what kind of music I was looking for, all of the temp music in the trailer and in the film was placed as a reference for the future music composer.

On 1st of August 2015 I met in one of the many Sofia's city parks Yancho Mihailov our 1st assistant director. Exactly one year after the shooting of NoOne we met by an accident. We were talking about the film and I shared with him that I was doing an open casting for music composers. He said to me, he was just finishing a short film on which music score they were using a very young and very talented female composer from Bulgaria. Her name was Emelina Gorcheva and at that time she was 24 years old. She already was giving lectures in the National Music Academy about classic music and piano.

I felt she might be the best choice even before to hear any of her work or any of her suggestions. I felt that a female perspective and touch would lift the film's emotional potential and would make it more sensual and intimate. Later on when we were doing Q and A sessions after the film screening I had to answer to the questions how is possible a man to speak and tell a story about a female sex and female inner world transformation. How was it possible for a man to know anything about the woman's inner struggle and joy? My answers were always the same, that first of all we are all human beings and second of all, that the main protagonists are women so they impact tremendously the story telling with their acting and their female individuality. However, most of all I was explaining to them is that our music composer is a female and she managed to create a score so intimate and so mystical and at the same time with a female intimacy and openness.

After I got her contacts from Yancho I immediately called her on the next day. I offered her to send us some concepts and some themes about the film. She was at that time on a holiday in Rhodope mountains and she was very much surprised to receive a call about a film which was shot in Rhodope mountain and was about a woman's inner journey towards wholeness and happiness. She was more than happy to try to make something about it so I sent her all of the references and the temp music and the trailer and at the end I sent her a private screener with the entire final cut.

She sent us the best theme from all of the submissions, she really got under our characters' skins and especially she managed to bring to screen the inner spiritual journey of Vera, our main protagonist.

We hired her and she got very nervous about that. She had scored the music for a short film called EAT ME from a fellow Bulgarian filmmaker Ilina Perianova. However, she had zero experience of composing music for a feature film and moreover for a psychological drama where I was demanding from her music to be the soul of our film, the soul of our characters.

Emelina didn't have a studio background so she wasn't able to produce the final score by herself, instead of that She was writing the music, scoring the themes and then she was going to work with her collaborator Pavel Stoychev in his studio, Pavel is a musician and sound engineer. He is one of the pioneers of Bulgarian electronic underground music scene.

What was our creative process with Emelina? Basically I was sending her all kinds of music which I was thinking that might be appropriate for the mood of the film. Also we did talk quite a lot about what I was looking for to achieve from the music soundtrack. I explained to her that we had to bring those very subtle nuances of the human inner world through the music. Another thing which we discussed was that I wanted the music to go through a transformation so to begin slowly and minimally and gradually to get richer and richer, basically to be as a mirror reflecting the transformation of our main character's inner world.

Emelina found these tasks at the same time very helpful but on other hand very difficult and even painful. Emelina spent two months of really painful creative process working in ambient cinematic music style, far, far away from what she was playing her entire life.

LINKs FROM SOUNDCLOUD AND FROM THE MUSIC CLIP

I was marking up the scenes frame by frame where I felt that I would need music, thus I was sending her only selected scenes and she was building the music theme piece by piece but always she had in her mind the bigger picture and the entire journey which we wanted to achieve with the score.

For the final track on board came Veselin Mitev- another very special person, an artist, musician and a great human being and Krasimir Zafirov a super cool 17 years old guitar virtuous.

After receiving her masters of the tracks I was sending them to our sound designer and sound mixer Kamen Atanasov who was building with the score and the sound design the entire soundscape of the film.

What I found for myself is that the music is the film's emotion and I think it is almost impossible to create an emotional piece of work without using music. For me and for the project Emelina, Pavel, Veselin and Krasimir did a fantastic job. Emelina did an unthinkable feature film music soundtrack debut. She literally jumped inside the fire and survived, not only survived but created one of the best ,deep, full with subtext and meaning of emotional film music.

She sang, played the piano and composed the entire score. She was very vulnerable and brave to embrace the film subject and to try to make it as emotional as possible.

Music has this universal power to connect, influence, inspire, move and uplift our hearts and minds. I realize that music combined with images, interwoven in complex subtext, has the potential to transform a character driven story into a character driven poetry.

CHAPTER 29