Nuts & Bolts

Dir. Newell Todd

My opportunity to score this film came about through an NYU student film contest. As one of the winners, I got to score the film and then perform it live, synched to picture. The scores were all conducted at the Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theater on April 30th and May 1st, 2004.

Per the contest guidelines, the score was written for flute, clarinet, trumpet, 2 percussionists, piano, violin, cello and bass. After discussing the picture with Newell, I decided to write the music as a two-layered approach. The first layer, a quasi-lounge jazz, played throughout to parallel the main character's sense of reality - his perception of life's normality. The second layer consisted of more tense, dissonant writing (i.e. the strings playing in quarter-tones, or the piano striking random keys) to illuminate the character's growing separation from reality.

Conducted by Austin Wintory