A report from Aelita performances at Kosmorama and Aladdin! Above, a two minute video montage of sound-checks, with one of the cues from the film. This is what it looks stumbling around during setup, rigging and balancing of sound, synchronizing image, tasting sushi.
First we played the Kosmorama film festival in Trondheim. I stayed there for most of the festival. The first few days I enjoyed the festival itself while fresh-ing up Aelita on the hotel.
I love film festivals, the buzzy atmosphere of the multiplex, the expectant drift from film to film, the program matrix to be decoded. It's like visiting a new world every third hour, with a coffee in hand. I wasn't able to catch all the films I wanted to see, but really really liked Leviathan and A Fallible Girl.
Friday was Aelita. The crew arrived at different times, and the cinema was partly in use for the festival. The whole day disappeared in an organized mess of sound-checks and setup. It's been some months since everyone was gathered, it was nice to be together again. It's a very lovable dysfunctional family.
The Trondheim performance was good. We had nice sound, nice energy and the dysfunctional family was on it's best behavior. I had made some changes since the 2012 performances, which helped both the film and the improvisation. For many cues I softened the transitions, after learning through previous performances that I need to be able to change timing and synchronization on the fly. So I built some parts to be more fluid and open. Also some scenes which originally had pretty stripped down orchestration, I layered more themes and / or character instruments, other scenes I did the opposite, simplified. OK maybe rearranging deck chairs on Titanic and it doesn't change a lot in total, but it made for better overall flow which made for better improvisation.
I've come to really like this, like with Jeanne D Arc, working with live film music and improvisational musicians means I can improve the score all the time. Or make a worse mess, doesn't matter really, I think what I enjoy is that I can continue working, the score is alive, no two shows are the same, and as performers we adapt to each evening's score.
The weekend following Aelita performance was Nordic Film Composer Symposium and the Harpa Awards (best Nordic Film Music), also part of Kosmorama. I missed the first day due to Aelita sound-checks, but attended all Saturday and Sunday. There were interesting seminars, good people and great discussions. It's really neat having laughs and beers and talk film music, composition, compare everyday challenges and experiences. Like if snake charmers meet they talk about baskets and flutes and cobras and stuff.
Sunday evening was the award ceremony and Trondheim Symphony Orchestra performed lots of Norwegian film music, this was magic. Like if snake charmers went on holiday together on a charter flight and watched Snakes On A Plane on the plane with all the snakes playing around on the floor. Although the concert hall looked like it was inside a shopping mall. I think it actually was.
I also had 45 minutes free to be a geeky tourist and went to look at the local cathedral and discovered quite intriguing weathering and moss.
Then I went back home for three days which felt like six minutes and then I got up at the dawn of mankind and went through one billion flights to Kristiansand and half-way there somebody in Copenhagen misplaced my equpiment bag with most of the controllers and cables and so I spent most of the day on the phone with SAS arrival crew and they were really helpful and I think I made them even more panicked than me and also I started arranging for replacement hacks but finally a few minutes before it was too late everything arrived and the SAS lady was cheering and I quickly put everything up and made ready and it worked and phew but if you can tell from this paragraph there was no pause all day and I was just organizing and operating logistics and managing and thats not a good space for my head when it needs to be super tuned to play and Mars in two hours so this affects me and it then affects the performance I guess at least for me so Kristiansand performance of Aelita ran like it should it had the same improvements as Trondheim I only messed up one cue but don't think many really noticed but still annoying the wrong theme for the wrong scene I fixed it daftly with some ugly crossfades which i'm sure was unnoticeable really but I was very stressed from the lost bag and all that administration being on phones and running around and just not being able to be ready when I should so I wasn't completely connected to the cinema or the sound or the film and never felt like I was really fully THERE and wasn't ZONE. Like if you're a snake charmer on charter holiday and they misplaced your flute on the flight and now your snake has gone off to the beach with the sunscreen and left it's mobile behind.
But we had a really great backstage at Aladdin, a whole cinema hall just for us. And after the show we went for micro brewery beers.
Another more fatal tragedy that happened on the way back home, confirming the cruelty of my hellish ordeal, I ran out of battery on my laptop on the flight. And what do I see, just outside my window? A perfectly fine AC outlet ON THE WING.
So there I sit, for an hour, with no battery, looking out the window, on an outlet. Why do they put it OUT THERE? I could almost touch it. If I had my snake charmer flute I could play my laptop charger cable out there.
Conclusion
Kosmorama success, Aladdin also worked well, but in retrospect this correspondent could've been more present. Good experiences, have lots of notes for improvement both musically and practically.
Why do they put AC outlets on the wings of airplanes?
