In July the short film Bugtussle by my friend Derek Sitter won best music at the Indie Shorts Mag Short Film festival. Bugtussle is great film created by Derek and loosely inspired by Of Mice and Men, but includes a drama between a couple of bank robbers. The entire film takes place in a shed hideout and explores the plight of the dispossessed.
Derek contacted me after he had made a rough cut of the first scene. Johnny Bourbon had create the intro riff and sent it to me to give me an idea of the feel of the film. I brought a guitar to Derek’s screening space and we watched the film together. At certain points he would describe what the music should try to accomplish emotionally to help the scene. I would try some ideas on my guitar as we watched. This really helped us spontaneously explore what worked and didn’t work in the scene. We were also able to try musical ideas in parts to see if music was needed. I made recordings of those ideas and marked times down for the parts of the rough cut.
Once I was back at my studio, I listened back and then created numerous ideas similar to the one we had tried during the screening. This was all about precision. The clips were made to the exact timeline of the cuts. Then, Johnny and I created over 50 short clips with various little bits of sounds and phrases that could be used as tiny elements of music wherever needed. These clips included everything from subtle guitar feedback to short songs on various instruments including acoustic guitar, electric guitar, dobro resonator guitar, pedal steel guitar, etc.
The idea Derek had early on, was that the character and desperation of the music would progress as the story progressed to help express the increasingly dire circumstances of the characters. This provided some great scope for ideas. We experimented with various ways to introduce tension in the music while mostly keeping it in the same genre. Certainly dissonant melodies could help, but even more powerful was distortion and feedback to communicate anger, danger, and desperation.