Wellington composer Marc Chesterman received some bizarre and challenging requests while creating music for the new Florian Habicht documentary Spookers.
One moment a chainsaw-wielding zombie is chasing screaming punters around a cornfield maze, and the next the same actor, still in full zombie get-up, might share something intimate from their personal life.
“Sometimes when you’re a composer on these projects you get asked to do some pretty random things. Florian knew he was having all these characters on the bed and a lot of them were going to be snoring so he says to me ‘Marc, [you need to] make some snoring music’.
"So I was kind of like, how am I going to make snoring music? What even is snoring music? Anyway, we got the sound recordist to record the characters all snoring on this bed scene that finishes the film. And again using those ideas of sampling and manipulating samples, we were able to fashion their snoring sounds into a little narrative of sorts and underlay that with a dreamy soft heartbeat type rhythm. It’s a nice gentle way to end things and it’s probably one of my favourite pieces in the film.”
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Andrew Clifford talks with Marc Chesterman about his score to the 2003 "grimm musical fairy tale" Woodenhead, Florian Habicht's debut feature here.
