Have you ever wondered how film scores come to life or what goes on inside the mind of a composer when he’s writing music for film? We certainly have, and we’ve got just the right person to help us decipher the magic that goes into the creative process of film scoring.
Colin Bell’s relationship with music goes as far back as he can remember. He was born into a musical family, playing and touring from a very young age, he studied music education at Kean University and music in scoring for film at Berklee College of Music, and has a decades-long experience as an accomplished composer, arranger, music teacher, and percussionist.
Recently, Colin has been making headlines in the entertainment industry with his first major film scoring project, Bezos. His sudden break and newfound success in the world of feature film scoring amped up his lifelong passion for music and the desire to explore new venues to express his creativity and follow his relentless imagination wherever it may take him next.
So, join us on an epic journey as we dive deeper into the fascinating realm of music composition with Colin Bell and gain a special glimpse of the creative process that goes on behind the scenes.
It’s all about telling a story with the music. So, the first thing I like to do is simply talk to the director and just listen. With Bezos, the director Khoa Le was really detailed about the spotting of the film but also very open to my approach to it. He was specific in terms of when the music comes in and out but he was very open to how I would interpret that. I listened to his take, we did a couple of spotting sessions, we talked through, and I took a lot of notes.
My first goal typically is to find the right sound for the film – that means instrument choices, timbres, colors, and so on. I like to use the crayon box metaphor a lot. We have a giant box of crayons and we’ve got to find the right color palette for the film. So, that’s the first thing we did. For Bezos we decided on an electronic score, synths from the ‘90s era, or earlier than that like the synth sounds of Kraftwerk, and even some familiar blips and bloops from old computers or dot matrix printers that invoke a certain nostalgia and era that we can all identify with.
Then, once we have agreed on the color palette that gives me the so-called box of crayons to work with, I’ll start trying to interject a different creative idea, something that’s a little off the cuff, so we’re not just simply doing things that have been done before. For example, in Bezos, I watched an early cut of the film and his character is very reserved. He only has choice moments, what I would call human moments when he lets his guard down, and emotions happen, so I needed something that would stand in contrast to that. My out-of-the-box idea was to use something completely different from the electronic score like a classical guitar for his theme in those moments. That was a different idea, the director was open to it, we experimented and we made it work. That’s an example of how we go from the 30,000-foot view of what is the color and the basic soundscape of the film, what are the instrument choices, to narrowing down the details. I find that’s the best way to do it.
My job as a composer is to try to find the right aesthetic; what’s the style, the color, the timbre, and the texture of the film. I can give you classical, orchestral, electronic, pop, whatever the genre may be. Then, once I can get inside the director’s head, I’ll start trying to think of creative things from my end to interject and introduce things that maybe the director didn’t think about, so we can experiment a little bit to make it special.
So, I’m going to be releasing the score to the film on an album and I’m really excited about it. I find that it’s listenable, it’s fun because it has groove elements to it, it’s melodic, and it has a little bit of everything. It’s not strictly atmospheric or lacking melody. It’s an enjoyable listen, each cue is a good length, and I feel it’s rewarding because you can get a sense of the story just by listening through the album, which is pretty cool. I did reorder a few cues just to make the musical journey make a little more sense, but it pretty much lays down almost in the exact order of the film, from beginning to end.
I’m on another great film project, which is in an early enough stage that I’m not supposed to talk about it yet, but I’m really excited about it. You can follow me on Instagram for updates. Other than that, I’ve been wrapping up the album cut I mentioned earlier. In terms of film, the Bezos experience made me rapidly get my infrastructure and business end in place. Colin Bell Music was created, and I have my team. I already had employees but the film formalized my relationships with my engineering team, people who assist me, etc.
Bezos came on very suddenly for me in a very small time window and I wrote the entire score myself, with no assistance. I only had an engineer who helped me with the final music mix and I had one musician I hired, and everything else was me, from playing to printing stems, prepping music for my musician, and all that stuff. I’m right now working on my infrastructure to make sure I have a couple more team members so I can expedite the process a little bit more, be ready for the next opportunity, and turn around even quicker and at an even higher level.
Outside of film, I’m doing some smaller projects right now. I have a very close artist friend of mine; his name is Jay Alders. He’s been an artist for over 20 years now, New Jersey born and raised just like me, and Jay has a very unique art style that has earned a lot of international acclaim. In fact, he was just featured in Forbes magazine recently. He’s in the Web3 NFT space as an artist; he sells a lot of pieces and does quite well in that space. He’s spoken at NFT.NYC, he’s a panelist often, and he’s really about this new environment where art can exist.
So, Jay came to me with the idea of taking his fine art oil paintings which are exquisite pieces of art, and animating them, in a slow-motion way, not like a cartoon animation, but you can see things move on the oil painting, which is a really interesting technological feat. And I’m writing underscores that play on a loop. The idea is that you have a piece of art that’s this absolutely beautiful painting, and now it has a little bit of movement and music to it. The minute I look at one of Jay’s pieces a thousand sounds and musical ideas go off of my head.
It’s an interesting cross-section because it’s kind of like film, being visual, but it’s also a little more interpretive because it’s just a bit of animation to a still image. So, it’s in between doing something like writing a piece of music to a piece of art and something that’s animated. It’s kind of this middle road and it’s been really satisfying. I just write these short little cues that are meant to play on a loop and then I give them to Jay and he sells them on the NFT marketplace. People seem to really like them a lot.
We’re hoping that one day the technology that we have in our homes can catch up to this. Imagine you have a painting of his in your home but it’s a projection and it can animate and play this music when you want it to. I think Jay’s ahead of the curve with this and it’s really rewarding to be a part of it. And it also gives me something different and unique to score, aside from composing film music.
You can check out some of these animated art pieces here:
With the rise of independent films that are able to tell these amazing stories and have amazing production value on these smaller budgets, I’ve noticed recently that the scoring has a minimalist element to it but it’s so effective. The music, although it might not be as “epic” or melodic as in an orchestral score, it’s incredibly effective in terms of making me feel an emotion or being immersed in the film, whether that be pleasant or really unsettling.
I love orchestral music, and I would absolutely love one day to write a giant 100-piece orchestral score for a huge studio film. But I’m really into creating new sounds and trying to tap into something different. I find it very artistic, new, and refreshing, and it’s something I’m really interested in pursuing.
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