Welcome to the ethereal splendor that is Harmony!
Harmony is an experimental film about a relationship between two women. The film explores emotions, feelings, and thoughts using visuals and audio to display them.
Through my process of working on Harmony, I went through many drafts. The first was nothing like we ended up with. I ultimately went with ambient synthesizer playing and experimenting with sending these sounds through Paulstretch. The chords themselves are very much cluster based, with broad strokes in orchestration and harmonic progression. My goal (and Trent’s goal) was to make the music as minimal as possible, so I played with a chord and then Paulstretched it to make thirty second snippets last for a good ten minutes! Trent also wanted to work with the audio himself and place the music where he wanted to, which is very hands-off for me and was shocking as I am used to having a finished film and writing directly to it. This led to me creating chunks for certain sections and Trent sequencing the music himself.
Everything was written in snippets directed towards certain sections, but each snippet was longer than the entire film, so Trent would take his favorite sections and sequence them to the section of the movie that I wrote for. There is probably over thirty minutes of audio not even used for the that I made for the film, which is insane (sorry for all of the listening you had to do Trent!)
The challenges in writing for this film were truly finding these great textures, as Trent had an aural vision in mind and I had to write music to fit to it. Getting inside his head was the ultimate challenge, but as soon as we had a joint session where I composed for him on the spot, the film went way way smoother.
I have to give a big thank you to director Trent Welstead for ultimately being patient with me and for going through all of the audio snippets that I sent him (there were many!)