Ambrosia (2012)

Starting in 2010 Eric Waetjen began production of an ambitious film project called Ambrosia, and he hired me to produce the soundtrack. This was my first film project, and it became far more work than I initially bargained for. I ended up composing at least half of the music (while recording all of it), producing all of the sound effects, editing all the dialogue, and recording much of it in my bedroom. The dialogue in particular was difficult, because we didn’t do any studio ADR (dialogue replacement), and the mic boom operators were extremely novice, making many errors. I had to clean up ambient noise sources as best I could, while maintaining the intelligibility of often muffled voices. Sometimes this meant a lot of editing, pulling words out of different takes to try and line them up with the takes Eric had chosen for the final cut (which never seemed to be very final). One scene stands out, because the cinematographer had used a some kind of manual wheeled dolly that made loud clacking noises. It was a herculean task that took about a year and a half. There were lots of gun shots and other sound effects that had to be added in as well. Composing the music was the easy part, even considering that I had to cleverly match up time signatures and musical bars to scenes that were already edited - sometimes necessitating rests and breaks that forced me to revise an earlier melody or rhythmic sequence. The end result obscures all of this hard work, which is how it should be. You can watch the film with an Amazon Prime account, or purchase it there. Below are some selections from the soundtrack.