LOS ANGELES -- If you've been to the movies lately, chances are you've heard music composed by Yoav Goren and Jeffrey Fayman of LA's Immediate Music (
www.immediatemusic.com). They recently provided music for movie trailers for films such as Spider-Man 2, Cat Woman, King Arthur and The Manchurian Candidate.
This studio developed a music library designed specifically for movie trailers. Their path to licensing trailer music wasn't an intentional one when they first starting writing music together in 1991. Back then their mutual aspiration was to become film composers. But life takes funny turns.
Fayman had scored a few trailers in the 1980s and they sent those tracks out to the local trailer houses as a calling card. Trailer house Aspect Ratio hired the two to score a few and the "trailer" door opened. Then something unexpected occurred: an editor at Aspect wanted to use a track from their demo tape and asked if it could be licensed.
"With that, the whole phenomena of licensing music was ignited for us," recalls Goren. "We realized that we could just keep writing music designed specifically for trailers, and editors could just drop that into their projects. We could write what we wanted and hopefully that stuff would license, and that's what happened."
Still, Goren and Fayman initially looked at this opportunity as a stepping stone to score feature films. "But we soon realized that we were able to write the kind of music we loved without having to be involved with a particular project," Goren explains. "With trailers, we could write the thematic elements that for us are the best part of film scoring. It's a big sound with big productions and music that's really over-the-top, and it's fun to work in that environment. We have friends that are film composers and it's not a bed of roses. We don't have to wrestle with a few cello notes lingering in the background of a scene. Our stuff is right out there."
And thus Immediate Music was one of the very first to tap into this new market and change the model of the way trailers were produced. Prior to that, trailer houses would either hire a composer for an original score or use an existing soundtrack from another movie. Both of these options are expensive and problematic for logistical reasons.
"You can now get great trailer music already done and cut the picture to that cue as opposed to wrestling with a custom score and trying to get that to fit the picture," says Goren. "Soundtracks have great moments for 15 seconds but then it falls off because it's scored to picture. So we know what the editors need and the sensibility they look for. Our tracks build and rise to a crescendo at the end, have starts and stops for the editor to allow a line of dialogue and then come back really big."
Immediate has 22 CDs, including 900 cues in their library of trailer music. In March, it released its latest CD, "Themes for Orchestra and Choir," which was in production for over a year and included recording a 100-piece orchestra and 70-member choir. It was off this latest CD that the track "La Crimosa" was taken for use by trailer house Mojo for Spider-Man 2. They are preparing for production on their next large orchestral and choir production to be recorded in Abbey Road Studios in August.
"These are massive undertakings produced at our own expense and maybe only 30 clients have this because of the cost," says Goren. "This music is about three or four times more expensive than our music [which is created in our studios], which itself is significantly more expensive than other music libraries."
THE GEAR
Goren and Fayman still work out of their home studios, though these rooms have grown in size and gear over the years. Both studios are powered with essentially the same gear: Sony DMX-R100 mixing boards, Digidesign Pro Tools and MOTU Digital Performer running on Macs, Roland and E-mu samplers, an array of synthesizers, Otari RADAR multitrack recorders, Manley EQ, Empirical Labs compressors, converters from Apogee, the Lexicon 480L and TC Electronics 6000 as their main reverb processors and Vision DAW PCs running the big orchestral sample libraries from TASCAM GigaStudio and Contact.
They have not hired any other full-time composers, though they do accept submissions from other noted composers. "We're always looking for people to write for us to meet the increasing demand," says Goren. "Word has spread around and we get a lot of stuff sent to us. Usually we'll remix it to give it our brand sound and then put it out. It's a great opportunity for other composers for an additional source of revenue."
ORIGINAL MUSIC
While the bulk of their revenue today comes from the library, they do still compose original music, like the piece they created for the trailer for a new Jerry Bruckheimer movie titled National Treasure. This steady revenue stream and the reputation they've built has allowed them to realize their former aspiration of scoring feature films.
"We do select certain film projects but those are small independent films where we get to write a different type of music than we normally do and a different type than you see in most movies," says Goren. "But still, with the trailer music we feel like we get to do the best part of film music."
BY MATTHEW ARMSTRONG
COPYRIGHT 2004 Advanstar Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
