liampeacockmusic - The Dark Knight Re Scored Part 3
The Dark Knight Re Scored Part 3
The Scene
This scene features the introduction to The Dark Knight himself, the main man, The Batman. The scene has many layers but at its face value, the scene features the Dark Knight entering in awesome fashion and dealing with some of the particularly nasty criminals of Gotham City while protecting and scolding some wannabe vigilantes who let's face it, suck at being Batman.
As usual, I'll run you through all the sections of the Orchestra and any other bits in the Cue I used.
The Strings
The Lower Octave
The lower strings, Cellos and Basses are a huge part of the sonic world I was trying to build with these cues. Aiming for the dark, edgy sort of feeling while trying to make the listener feel like somethings going to happen, and it's not necessarily a good thing.
As you can see from the below image, the actual parts the Celli & Bass are playing are not really that complex, but layered with the brass, the feeling I was going for was definitely achieved. The slow building tension is created by the notes going up in pitch one after another but never quite going all the way.
Short Strings
The short strings in this cue are everywhere. I use a lot of Col Legno samples, which are those rhythm almost ticking sounds at the beginning of the cue. They constantly come in and out of the track, either to build up to a scene or to provide a lot of pulsating gut wrenching energy to parts of the scene, like when Batman is fighting some thugs.
In the last third of the cue, some more typical short strings come in, playing repeated rhythms, again just to build that sense of energy leading up to (but again not quite resolving) to a climax of the scene, where those gorgeous sweeping strings come in at the end of the cue.
The Brass
The brass in this cue are usually doing a lot of layering. When the Cellos and Basses are repeatedly playing a building motif at the beginning of the cue, the trombones, bass trombones and tubas are there to back up the motif and give it even more weight and levity.
The motif below is a variation of the famous Dark Knight theme, simple two notes that Zimmer adapted from the Elfman work.
The Percussion
There is really a lot of percussion to talk about in this track, from rhythmic stuff keeping the pulse and energy. Later in the track there are some massive sub bass sort of drops or booms, which fall in to the realms of effects more than straight/real instrumentation. I use some Surdos later in the track too, which are these wonderfully large drums that are hit with sticks but they are great for producing strong powerful patterns or rhythms.
The Synths
I was rather proud of some of the synth work I developed in this Cue. There is a section of the cue where I used a lot of MIDI automation to develop a sound that has some white noise and filters sweeping to create an awesome almost windy noise, which at that point of the scene, where the Batman is about to jump off a high ledge to disable the criminals get away vehicle.
There is also this really cool Hard Attack Synth from Spitfires Stephenson string library. If you whack the modulation up (CC#1) you get a really cool gated decay sound that is great for stabs of sound, to create impact at certain points in the cue.
As usual, thank you for reading this (those of you that stuck it out until the end). I will mention the problem with writing this retrospectively is I'm writing from memory, my thoughts while writign this and so on.
If you have any questions, or are curious about anything I am talking about, let me know, drop a comment below!