28/07/2023
DE IMPERIO, another masterful animation by Alessandro Novelli will premiere at Locarno Film Festival this August. Once again I had the absolute pleasure to help him realise his vision through the music and sound design, with my favourite collaborators.
Once again it's a powerful, metaphorical audio-visual poem about power, control, politics, meaning, the follies of society, unintended consequences and more. All without a word of dialogue!
This time, being the final part of a Trilogy (The Guardian, Contact and now De Imperio), I really wanted to create a deep sonic connection across all three, just like Alessandro has done visually with his team.
What is amazing for me working with Alessandro is the freedom and trust he gives me to explore what we can say with the film through sound and music. I got to work with some of my favourite collaborators to make it happen - Sasha Agranov on haunting Cello layers, Aleix Puig for his soaring Violins, Xavi Lozano on "whatever he plays becomes a flute", Jonathan Darch for the amazing Sound Design and Dani Zacarias for the Dolby Atmos 3D sound mix extravaganza, with help from Jaume Puig of Dolby. A Dream team for me. Not to mention a wee cameo for Luka Peros as one of the giants.
Once I saw that the story revolved around a strange, labyrinthine space I realised this would be perfect for Dolby Atmos, and pushed to make that happen. If you get a chance to hear it in Atmos, I highly recommend it as the sense of space and direction is central to the narrative power of the sound design and the relationship between the characters.
For the music, I dug back into the free-style recording session I did with Sasha Agranov way back in 2015 for The Guardian, where I created a cut and paste collage in a strange, atonal style to create that score. ( It was a session rich with amazing, long improvisations -typical for Sasha, who is a monster improviser - and some of them fitted so perfectly on long parts of the film that I ended up deciding to share the composer credit with Sasha.)
For De Imperio, I went back and picked out many of the unused ideas and started to layer them into the new film. Then I asked Aleix Puig to come in and record new violin material on top to really connect it all together.
For the middle, colourful, trippy section I got my favourite wind instrument player Xavibufa, who could probably make you cry on a film score playing a damn potato with holes in it (im not joking), and he brought in his "steel police barrier turned into a baritone flute". What a sound he gets out of that thing!
For the sound design and mix, I teamed up with my new favourite film collaborators, Jonathan Darch and Dani Zacarias, and together we weaved a 3D soundscape that is probably more important than the music itself. Jonathan took my sound design sketches and turned them into cinematic joy, with masterful ideas to create just the right level of emotion, action and humor for the dozens of characters on screen, large and small, none of whom speak but they all should be understood. No easy task!
Then Dani weaved his 3D magic in Dolby Atmos. We have spiders running over your head, giants stepping off screen and thundering off into the distance off to your right, muffled voices of tiny characters in distant, claustrophobic rooms and immersive soundscapes with rain on the horizon.
All in all, an utter joy to work on, once again. Sorry for the long post but Alessandro's projects are like little diamonds on my timeline and I highly recommend you watch them... I can't wait to do the next one!
