John Konsolakis

Dissecting the Process

After watching Bluebottles (1928), directed by Ivor Montague, I was amazed by the way with which the film balanced drama and comedy, with its serious/mysterious opening making the viewer think they are in for a dramatic ride, one that quickly gets derailed by the over-the-top comedic sequence of the policemen responding to the whistle being blown. It was this characteristic of the film and the challenge it posed for my music to complement such extremely contrasting scenes (as well as everything in between) that made me interested in rescoring it.

My choice to use an orchestra for the film was mostly inspired by the whistle sequence, which seemed to require a sizeable ensemble able to keep up with the constant escalation in the visuals. I also wanted to be able to use a wide variety of orchestral colours and orchestrational techniques to reflect specific characters in the story. Some of those include the prominent use of muted horns and clarinets for the Policemen, the use of harp, vibraphone and sustained strings for the mischievous thieves, and the prominent, lyrical melodic lines played by the first violins for Elsa Lanchester’s character.

Regarding the style of the music I composed, I did not want to write pastiche/cliché sounding accompaniment to the film, but I consciously made an effort to use a musical language that would ‘feel’ appropriate for the period, as to avoid a stylistic mismatch with the images. Therefore, diminished and augmented chords, string tremolos, repeating triads, militaristic marches, etc. are all prevalent in my composition, not because I made a list of such conventional techniques and sought to include them, but rather because they ‘felt’ and ‘sounded’ more appropriate in relation to the film in comparison to a contemporary-sounding approach to those same issues. This idea of tonal matching is something that also informed my approach at producing the ‘recording’ (MIDI mock-up), as applying EQ in a way that imitated the sound of orchestral recordings in the early to mid-twentieth century (mostly by reducing the low frequencies) lent the music a ‘sound’ more fitting to the character of the film than a polished, high-end production value would have, thus facilitating a deeper immersion for the audience.

In my spotting of the film, I separated my chosen excerpt into seven broad sections (analysed below), based on its narrative structure, to help me organise my approach to scoring it. Furthermore, I spent some time finding general tempo values for each of those scenes and their subsections that followed the flow of the footage and the rhythm of the editing, and best matched the sources of diegetic sound (like the firing of guns, blowing of whistles and hitting of bells), all of which would have a matching sound effect if the film had not been silent. Here also my aim was not to produce a score that is ‘mickey-mousing’ such events, but to try to incorporate them naturally in the musical score by synchronising the tempo of the music with the editing of the film so that they align with parts of the musical bar. Additionally, to allow for this score to be performed live with either a click track or streamers and punches, I tried my best to keep the tempos as consistent as possible through extended sequences and to limit ‘rubato’ fluctuations, mostly featuring them at the endings of phrases or sections.