Five Fingers | Element Films

The task of a music editor varies depending on the project.  Sometimes it can be slam-dunk easy and other times, painstakingly challenging.  Sometimes it’s robotically formulaic, and other times immensely creative.  On extremely rare occasions, it’s all of those — and the line between sound designer, composer, and music editor gets blurred.  That was this project.

‘Five Fingers’ was unique in that when it was turned over to me, no music had been arranged to picture.  In fact, it’s so unique, I’ve never heard of any other film working this way.  But alas, it was my job to take a library of musical elements and create a score from scratch.  Vernon Reid (formerly of the band Living Colour) provided an amazing collection of drones, hit, stings, drum loops, weird piano scraping samples, as well as some great ethnic guitar motifs for me to work with.  Having all of these elements at my disposal and having the freedom to create my own vision of the soundtrack was one of the most gratifying creative experiences I’ve had working on a film.  I relished the opportunity, realizing I probably would never be given this amount of creative freedom again on any other project.

There was one logistical issue though.  Vernon was based out of New York and I was working in LA.  While I was responsible for cutting everything, he needed to sign off on it.  Sending cues over the internet for approval, while feasible, wasn’t necessarily efficient.  And as I’ve discussed before, the nuances of music editing can be infinitesimal.  So, I created a setup that streamed the video and audio from the Pro Tools at my studio via iChat, allowing Vernon to audition my edit with synchronized picture, in real time, from the comfort of his own studio — across the country.

We spent a couple of months re-working the music as the picture changed.  The producers felt that it needed a little more embellishment so they brought on a second composer, Noah Agruss who recorded some additional amazing music cues.  We ended up using a combination of cues that Vernon and I had created, and cues that Noah had scored to picture.

After spending months on the music edits, we unfortunately had some severe last minute musical change notes come in while we were on the mixing stage.  Many of the cues that we spent months perfecting had to be completely re-arranged rather hastily.  It was a shame because while I liked my original edit, I wasn’t very happy with the final cut.  Because of that, I’m posting the original “sound editor’s cut” version below.  I wasn’t the fx editor or re-recording mixer on this film, but out of necessity I edited all of the sound fx in this version as well as dialog edit and mix.  The clip below is representative of how I would have liked it to sound.

(INSERT CLIP HERE)