As the summer has started, more changes are coming for many things related to geoffreyburch.com. To begin, my website finally seems to be working properly. For months it intermittently shut down. I scrapped the whole thing and started fresh, which given my lack of website building capabilities, took an extraordinarily long amount of time.
But I got it changed.
And it still didn’t work.
But that is all taken care of and I am anxious to get this summer underway. My latest feature length project, “Smile,” premiered at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase on July 20 at Washington University.
“Smile” was an unusually difficult score to produce. There were several factors leading to its difficulty, some of which I could do nothing about and others which challenged me to grow as a composer and maybe even a human being.
This project started around November. I absolutely love the holidays but they are not at all conducive to accomplishing tasks that require inordinate amounts of time. Even if a holiday only lasts for one day, it is still an issue for me to change momentums from creativity and composing to making sure swaths of food are properly cooked for distant relatives that were hungry an hour ago.
There was also the issue of a hard drive failure, which even if completely backed up, (it wasn’t), is still a frustrating experience.
With those two issues aside, the largest challenge I faced with this soundtrack was to keep it fresh. I started composing the melodies on the piano, as I typically do, and I just could not shake the feeling that everything I was doing was a rehash of something previous. This can be an easy position to be in when you compose music daily.
After a lot of frustrating obsessing I finally managed to find a direction that seemed inspired and worked with the vision of the movie. Over the past 8 years I have become exceedingly good at composing and producing music for visual media. With that said, being “good” at something can potentially rob us of the experience of using a resourcefulness that sometimes only comes with a lack of resources. With that in mind, I ventured to make this process simpler and more intimate.
I have detailed some of that in the video, “Composing the music for the movie, ‘Smile.’” Give it a watch and let me know if you have any questions.
Geoffrey Burch