Connor Mayers
Emotional Scenes From
My Favorite Movies
​My project consists of three pretty emotional scenes from three of my favorite movies (Columbus, The Polar Express, and Moonlight). I wanted to create original compositions that best fit the emotion of the scene so I could reexamine the scenes and discover what made me love them so much when I first saw them. I hope these scenes and compositions reflect a range of emotions and showcase what makes music and film so powerful.
Columbus
The emotion I tried to evoke for this scene was doubt. The two characters in this scene are having a conversation about how different people's attention spans work, especially when it comes to things like video games or books. The female character is skeptical of the other character's argument, and is also skeptical of him as a person (she later turns down his offers to go out. To evoke this feeling of doubt I tried to use a combination of instruments and chords that would evoke a sort of "neutral" feeling. The strings really added to this and I added a quiet brass section as well to try and reinforce this theme. The main melody is played by a piano and kind of jumps up and down to represent the shifting feelings one has with doubt. Learning about the moods behind specific chords/instruments really helped me find my emotion in this piece, and I think by using a good mix of both upbeat and downbeat instrumentation I was able to capture the idea I had. I first started by laying the backbone with some chords from a string section that would loop throughout the piece. From there I decided to add a piano melody and a choir section to serve as the real foreground of the piece, and then I added some brass at the very end. I enjoyed trying to capture a specific emotion as well as getting more practice with my audio software.
Columbus. Directed by Kogonada, performances by Haley Lu Richardson and Rory Culkin, Sundance Institute, 2017.
The Polar Express
​The emotion I tried to get for this piece was suspense, as this part of the movie shows the Polar Express sliding across the a frozen lake while out of control. To achieve this, I decided to make heavy use of loops to make a repetitive sounding piece to really hammer home the feeling. I decided to put the piece in a minor key (D flat minor,) as we learned in class that minor keys have a much more sinister or evil sound. I also sped up the tempo to give the piece a frantic feeling, as the scene it accompanies is very frantic as well. My general process for this piece was to select a collection of loops that gave a somewhat menacing or anxious sound and then turning them up or down in volume based on how important I thought they were to contributing to the emotion. Ultimately, I incorporated some piano, harp pizzicato, and bass to give my piece a very heavy sound. I liked the process for this piece and was really surprised with the huge amount of loops available on Soundtrap, and trying to find a collection of sounds that would work well together was a very fun activity.
The Polar Express. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Warner Brothers, 2004.
Moonlight
The emotion I tried to capture for this scene was peacefulness. The context for this scene is that the main character, Chiron, has an incredibly touch home situation and is bullied at school as well. Here we see him wander around Miami and night and eventually meet a classmate named Kevin at the beach. Although Chiron is often kicked around, this scene serves as a way for him to find some peace. As such, I tried to incorporate some calming and mellow sounds into the piece. When making this piece, I wanted to base it around a specific loop and then add some smaller pieces to make a more minimalist piece that still communicated my emotion. I added a loop of some peaceful piano chords that I made the focal point. I also added some ocean noises, since part of this scene takes place on a beach, and in the original sound for the movie you can hear the waves beating on the sand. Then I added some quiet orchestral swells to give the peace a little bit of added texture. I think this piece turned out really well for being so simple and definitely matches the mood of the scene.
Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins, performances by Ashton Sanders and Jharrel Jerome, A24, 2016.