The Dark Knight ReScored Part 2

The Scene

This cue is from the very first scene of The Dark Knight and features the introduction of the Joker. This means that this is the first opportunity for the composer, in this case, me, to introduce the Joker, musically, with a motif. The scene is essentially a bank heist scene in progress, all the way from the team of thieves breaking into the bank with shotguns in hand, to the Joker's escape, in a school bus during the Gotham City school home time. 
Some of the shots (film producer lingo right here) are lengthy, and this provides an opportunity to do one of two things, start building tension or create some action, with high paced rhythms. 
The music of this scene, in my humble opinion, had to do three things, tell the Joker's introduction story, introduce the people of Gotham and set at least a portion of the sonic world up, for the rest of the movie to come. 

The Music

This is what I came up with, in full. Listen to this audio clip, so you have context (unless you already watched my YouTube video with the Soundtrack attached). 

Now, at the risk of sounding like a fanatic, I started my orchestral writing journey, with a heavy influence of Hans Zimmer (who just so happened to write the original motion picture soundtrack for The Dark Knight). So you may well hear some influence in my own writing and I would be flattered if you did. 
 

Now, at the risk of sounding like a fanatic, I started my orchestral writing journey, with a heavy influence of Hans Zimmer (who just so happened to write the original motion picture soundtrack for The Dark Knight). So you may well hear some influence in my own writing and I would be flattered if you did. 

The Strings

The strings in this cue are very minimal. Some stabbing staccato notes are used throughout to just add some pulsing tension in the rhythms.

N.B. Staccato is when the instrument is played or voiced with a short note or stabbing sound. 

Later on in the cue, a short melody is played in the short strings section of my template. This generally just sets the mood a little more than before and adds some different colours in to the cue than just percussion and a constant synth part that I'll get on to later. 

The Percussion

The Percussion in this cue is minimal but it serves the job I wanted it to. I have this quick rhythm playing in the first third of the cue, with a delay on it to increase the sort of anxious nature of the performance. This keeps going while the different bank heist characters are introduced and cuts in and out. The reason for these edgy sticks cutting in and out is to build tension and add a sense of time, which is why they sort of sound like hands of a clock ticking too fast.

Later on in the cue, I added some larger drums, Taiko's and the like, with some building rhythms, with accents on the fourth beat of each bar to begin with. This gives the effect of building up to something unexpected and also builds on the other percussion layers I threw into the cue. 

There are also some sub-bass Easter Island (Spitfire Audio) booms in the cue, to accentuate some of the different sync points in the cue.

N.B Sync Points are where something happens in the footage, like a door being slammed. This presents an opportunity to have some audio file or sound play at this point to provide the sound for this point and in the Soundtrack for this part, it is often a good idea to use some sort of musical idea to help accentuate the sound.  

Synths

Although perhaps not the most obvious part of the cue, synths are the most common and stable thing in this cue. There is, in the bass and sub-bass frequency ranges, a synth part that is practically playing throughout the whole track. There are a couple of time signature changes, like a 5/4 bar for example, and the synth follows that too. This creates the looming tension that needed to be in the entire cue, because the whole point of this scene and ultimately the music, is the build-up to the reveal of the Joker. So tensity was important but again, a sense of looming was necessary. 

Loops & Trailer FX=

There isn't necessarily much to say about the Trailer FX & Loops in this cue but there are some Logic FX sounds I used to make a point of some of the particular sync points in the cue. For example, earlier on in the scene, a window is smashed to allow some high-wire tom-foolery and I used an effect to make a point of this. There was just something missing when I watched my audio back with the footage at this point and I wanted to address this and at the time, all I had to hand was the in-built Logic sounds (which really aren't that great).

Final Thoughts

There are some things that I wanted to touch on in the cue that are important that I haven't yet talked about. Hans Zimmer is a composing genius and he built on all the previous work on Batman scores, from the likes of Danny Elfman and developed the motif further to a two note motif. 

N.B Motif is a theme or musical idea that is used to represent a character or important 'thing'. For example, we all know the iconic theme from Jaws? Well that is arguably the motif for the shark.

So I tried to build on this idea, just a bit, with layering strings and brass together to create a very similar idea to that of Hans's original idea. 

This project was concluded almost a year ago exactly and I have, believe it or not, come a long way in my 'expertise'. So there is kind of a lot I would change about this cue but this is what I created and I was very proud of it at the time. But in writing this cue, the next two got better and better and much more in line with where I wanted them to go, in terms of how they sounded. 
 

Hopefully, in the next two posts I can demonstrate to you that I developed and my skills developed further. 

I hope you keep reading and stay tuned for the next few posts!

Thanks for reading.