Ever self-critical, Tupilak composer Jordan Dobbins takes us through the challenges and triumphs of scoring our most ambitious film yet.

Learning by Doing: Composing the Score and Recording the Sounds for ‘Tupilak’

My first impression when watching Tupilak in its early form post-shoot was of the ambitious increase of this project’s scope. The film was longer, more ambitious and drew on a broader range of filmic influence than my last collaboration with Andrew and Ashley, The Beachcomber. A couple of years had passed and I had made a certain amount of progress in how I approached composing and recording music. However, being very aware that I was, and still am, deficient in my abilities to make the sounds I want to make, and achieve the quality I want to achieve, the film in front of me was going to involve lots of creative discovery.

It is at this point that I stepped forwards, and set to work. The rewards for doing so I will set out briefly here, including a little along the way with regards some key challenges and some solutions, or lack thereof, that I managed to grasp. Hopefully this will be an encouragement for others who are interested but daunted by a certain creative endeavour to step with your best foot forward. Healthy collaborative environments are rewarding and, most importantly, fun.

Composition and the mystery of Viking music

For The Beachcomber I had immediately set to work unearthing a world of influence that I already knew a fair deal about, specifically early 20th century culture. Virginia Woolf occupied a part of British history that I felt comfortable exploring. Norse culture, however, was not steady ground for me. Through reading several interesting articles and a book or two I managed to get a feel for what might work as a tableau of creative signposts, but, at the heart of it, not much is known about Viking music. Avoiding the pitfall of stereotype or pastiche was going to be difficult, and doubtless I haven’t entirely succeeded in my endeavour to do so.

What I learned in encountering this difficulty, however, was a more honest way of approaching a project. In trying to think what the film was trying to say, rather than understand the world that it draws its creative energies from, I was forced into a different way of creating musical themes and ideas. The main string theme came from several sessions sat at the piano trying to think of chords and movements that had a pre-Western and disjointed strangeness to them. The melody came afterwards, and was fully formed when Alex, on violin, riffed off the main thematic contour to create the countermelody that sits underneath it.

It is also important to note that a lot of my influences came from the genre and cinematic influences that Andrew pointed me in the direction of, many of which can be seen on the short Spotify playlist I have put together for this blog. If I would have been more skilled some of the influences may have been worn less on the sleeve, but as a first experience of really delving into other composers’ corpuses of work, to discover techniques or musical ideas that would work for what I am doing, it was a wonderful and very gratifying experience. 

Battling with Layers and Technology

This is the first project I have worked on which stretched the capabilities of my setup. I had to split my ProTools session into two halves in order to have the number of active tracks I needed (a solution also would have been spending a bit more money, but I frugally avoided that, at least for now). This did, however, restrict my ability to use bussing as effectively as it could have been used. I learned a lot about compression techniques in this time, in trying to get the several layers of strings and sampled/synthesised sounds to mesh well. I was in over my head, but this meant a lot of problem solving as well as a lot of knowing when to say ‘that works well’ even if I couldn’t say ’that is exactly what I envisioned’.

Percussive elements, forged from samples of rocks and nature sounds as well as the occasional banging of an acquired kick drum with a cloth covered ladle, were one of the biggest challenges I encountered. Before this point I had often leaned toward more melodic elements to carry the rhythmic impulse of a score. The textured and earthy strangeness of many of these foundational rhythmic elements really underscored the more pagan elements of the film, and massively paid off when heard in the context of the finished product.

Diegetic sound: An Unforeseen Challenge

A large part of this film relies on the visual texture of the landscape and the painting of an unforgiving relationship between Saga and Greenlandic nature. What I didn’t encounter until over halfway in to the creative process was how difficult it would be to marry the diegetic sound with the score. Letting the story speak both through the sounds we see on screen and the music that supports the narrative was a difficult balance. Working with Ashley specifically, close in time to the premiere in East London, was an important part of this process. I began to understand how foley elements can really help tell the story as convincingly as a melodic non-diegetic part of the score can. 

Much of the foley had to be re-recorded or acquired from samples, whilst some of it was taken from on-location recordings. One particularly notable example of creating the soundscape post-shoot was the two occasions where Lily, the actor who plays Saga in the film, is seen shouting in solitude into the distance. Lily had to re-record her shouts using a field recorder from her house in South London. After I received this raw audio information I took the stereo .WAV files and added in artificial echoes, and doctored the audio using EQ in a way that made it sound authentic and truly from the wilderness. 

It has been another wonderful experience working with everyone involved with Tupilak. I have learnt so much by doing, rather than thinking, and the common energy and goal that we all shared – to make Tupilak as convincing and professional as we could manage – was a wonderful catalyst both for our own individual development and for the finished product of the film itself.

You can watch Tupilak, complete with Jordan’s original score, here.

Last weekend saw the Tupilak team’s final day of postproduction workflow with genius editor Ashley Hughes and maestro composer Jordan Dobbins joining me in London for a combined grading and mixing session.

We were delighted with the film as we had screened it in the amazing basement space of The Hoxton Cabin back in February, when we had graded for the projector down there and mixed the sound on the morning of the screening to exactly match the acoustics of the room and speaker rig. Our initial plan had been a rapid turnaround of that cut to get it online. That was before Covid-19 happened, and since then we have all been working at a distance (and around the clock on our other jobs) which is a challenge on a film edit. One unanticipated lesson we have learned is the huge difference in colour range and saturation between monitors even within the same product family: a grade done by Ashley and watched by Jordan and me remotely looked completely different on each screen. We knew there would be some variance, but this was something we only truly appreciated when finally able to work on monitors side-by-side.

The postproduction day reminded me why I love this part of the filmmaking process. Another opportunity to revisit the story and source material, a reminder that we have full control over the direction and mood of the story through the edit, the power of the score and what you can do with sound. For a few hours, Ashley worked in one room of my apartment on the visuals while Jordan worked on the audio in another, and it was great being able to watch both work their magic.

Jordan also pulled together a Spotify playlist of the soundtracks he has been using for inspiration, which you can check out below.

You’ll find the film up here tomorrow, and we’re hoping to follow it soon with some commentary on the score, the shoot and more. Enjoy.

Almost two years to the day since we wrapped The Beachcomber on a windy beach in Devon, Ashley, Lily and I were back on location — this time in Snowdonia, to shoot our most ambitious short film to date, Tupilak. We were joined on set by Alex Newton, one of the creators behind Citric Acid, and together spent five days hiking up the mountains of the Idwal Valley laden with iron pans, spears, fish and furs to create a settlement for the last of the Norse Greenlanders, Saga, as she struggled to come to terms with her people’s disappearance.

We had been inspired by an article from the amazing Ernest journal about the mysterious spiritual totems carved by the Inuit people of Greenland to ward off foes, and the disappearance around 1500 AD of the seemingly stable community of Norse Greenlanders. Lily led our deeper research into their unexplained disappearance without trace after a history of rich storytelling and crafting, which was invaluable in pinning our abstract script into reality, the mythology and the remaining artefacts that are all we have left of the Greenlanders.

Shooting in a remote location (and for the purposes of filmmaking, I’d say remote is anywhere that isn’t an urban centre) creates additional challenges, and doing so at dusk even more so. There were a lot of snap decisions to make; the vast majority of them I am happy with, some (as always) I awaited nervously in the edit, but I owe an awful lot to the whole team for their input in the month before and on every long day of the shoot, and to the very long lead-in process with Ashley which has been absolutely lifesaving. Ashley and I first talked about a tupilak-oriented film very shortly after wrapping The Beachcomber (I think we discussed the article which inspired it while setting up for our first London preview in my apartment at the time) and subsequently spent the better part of a year on drafts of the script, and a further six months on the shot list and other logistical points. Not only did this mean the same film existed in both of our heads, but that we had already worked through many of the issues that we expected the location to throw at us, so when indeed we were confronted with difficulties we had already discussed the compromises that would be available.

Shooting digitally on a serious project has brought with it a new workflow. While I loved the experience and discipline of shooting on film (as we did on The Beachcomber), if I am honest I preferred being able to see the frame in real-time, while keeping as much of the restraint and long-take approach that we had learned from 8mm. It shows in the cut: watching the rushes back, we could already see that we had the material we had envisioned when preparing the shot list, rather than buckets of footage we had shot because it looked good. The lesson learned back on James was that over-shooting feels liberating, but it makes the edit very challenging. Once we had the footage up on the screen, I felt the familiar sense (which never gets old) of rediscovering the film from scratch. Assembly was first done remotely between London and Paris, a tricky process in itself, but I hope this gave Ashley the space he needed to take a fresh and radical approach to editing. When we were reunited in London, we finished the loose ends and the trickiest scenes together, and even three weeks out from screening were still tinkering on sequences that finally came together as what we had intended.

This was my first film project featuring serious costume, and I learned a valuable lesson: that costume is essential, even if your project is contemporary and your characters relatable to your own lives. Why settle for ‘wear whatever you normally do’, when as you can make a valuable directorial decision about a character that also gives the actor space to distinguish between themselves and their role? And no post on this film would be complete without discussing our fantastic props and giving a huge thank you to Rebecca Taylor for sourcing an amazing array of antique material in a very short space of time. We definitely invested more energy into production design for this project than any other, partly again because of the period, but we quickly learned that obtaining vintage daggers, iron cooking tools and rusting lanterns was not going to be easy.

Acquiring a tupilak carved by a Greenland-based craftsperson was one of the key artistic decisions we made for the production. I thought it was important to have a daily reminder on location of the powerful history and wicked intent that was bound up in these objects, echoing the RSC’s use of a real skull in its traditional Hamlet stagings. We had previously stumbled across an Inuit art gallery on Paris’ Right Bank which sold a range of carved figures including replica tupilaks, but although we certainly hope that ours is no more real in the ominous sense, I felt that getting one from Greenland was important. In an age of lazy cultural appropriation, I thought the very least we could do was strive to work with authentic source material.

Bringing Saga’s story to life was a saga indeed, but it was one of the most rewarding projects I have worked on, and I’m delighted with what the team has built. I couldn’t be more proud to have directed it.

 

 

For 500 years the Norse Greenlanders made their home in the wilderness. In 1450, they disappeared without a trace.

 

But what if there was one left? The mystery of the Norse people first caught my attention in 2016 when I read an article by an Ernest writer on the tupilak, the haunting, cursed figurines that were crafted from bones and awful things to bring wickedness on the enemies of the inuit. The rich, written and illustrated mythology of the Norse made their sudden disappearance – without serious archaeological evidence as to any reason why – even more compelling as a story. And so began a two year project of researching and drafting. The challenge was in telling a story with only one character and a bleak winter landscape, that was on the one hand compelling and on the other avoided the wilderness porn of an SUV advert.

So I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Tupilak, our latest, longest and most ambitious short film yet, starring Lily Taylor (Beachcomber, Plenty, James) and Alex Newton (Citric Acid, Jerusalem), shot and edited by Ashley Hughes (who has worked his visual magic on eight films with me from 2017’s Beachcomber back to 2011’s Tantamount to Treason), and featuring a stunning score from the musical genius of Beachcomber, Jordan Dobbins. Matt Ceo’s striking poster design plunges us straight into the crucible in which our protagonist, Saga, finds herself. Haunted by demons and the wilderness, how will the last of the Norse Greenlander’s survive?

We were delighted to hold our first screening among friends and family in London’s wonderful Hoxton Cabin bar and events space at the end of January. Thirty guests joined us to watch the film, which we finished (in typical fashion) just a couple of hours before, working through the night on the final mix. Since then, the team has been working hard on festival submissions and preparations for some ‘deep dive’ exploration into our process, the history behind the film, and our responses to the Greenlanders’ plight. We’re excited to be launching podcast episodes as well as more posts here in the very near future.

Watch this space for more details.

www.andrewhall.org/tupilak