San Francisco, CA (February 14, 2014)—Scoring composer Nathan Johnson recently worked at Studio Trilogy in San Francisco on the music for sci-fi thriller, Young Ones.
In addition to recording strings with San Francisco’s Magik Magik Orchestra at Trilogy, Johnson recorded one of the film’s themes with a music box he programmed. “The music box was less programming and more just punching holes in a paper strip with a hole puncher. In this version, it essentially only has the white keys of a piano, so I wrote the melody for that and then wrote the rest of the music around it. I worked with the string ensemble, but then there are also synthesized elements. The music for this film is very melodic, but mostly horns and strings are the lead instruments.”
The film debuted with strong reviews at the Sundance Film Festival where Steven Spielberg, godfather of director/screenwriter Jake Paltrow, attended the screening. Young Ones stars Michael Shannon, Elle Fanning, Nicholas Hoult and Kodi Smit-McPhee. A hybrid of Western and sci-fi genres, Paltrow’s second film is a tale of revenge set in the future when water is scarce and many have fled a barren land in search of a better life.
“I worked with the Magik Magik Orchestra previously on the film Looper, but this was the first time I worked at Studio Trilogy,” Johnson explained. “It was perfect—not only a great studio, but great musicians and recording engineer Justin Lieberman did a really fine job, making it a really smooth session. In addition to all of that, the studio has a nice apartment and it’s so comfortable when you’re in a different city working on a project that you don’t have to think about all that. You just wake up and walk across the hallway to the studio and then at the end of the day you head back and hit the sack.”
Studio Trilogy
studiotrilogy.com
