Henry recorded this with actress Michele Mariana in a studio and we didn’t have the same tonality, so I had to use my imagination to change the tonality. For example I’d compose the music for one sequence, a long sequence, and afterwards they cut the sequence, so I had to always keep changing. I’m thinking of all of the aspects, but the characters were important. After this it’s the recording session because I don’t want to definitively fix the music with the score. Nick Dawson examines just what makes him so special. I write the melody for the score, the harmony, details of the instrumentation. The first full length motion picture Bruno composed was Lien de parenté (1986) for Willy Rameau. I remember the last month, I didn’t sleep during one month because it was a lot of work to change and to add certain music to the film when you’re editing. For example, music boxes, sometimes when used in the music for movies they are very strange and scary. It’s the innocence and appearance of a lie that swallows up a child with fear, and when the truth is revealed, it leaves them with nightmares forever. And with the children’s choir there are a lot of contrapuntal voices. The eponymous heroine is a young girl who has just moved with her parents into a very old house broken up into flats. That kind of thing you can obtain only with very good soloists. Sometimes the music reveals another part of the film, the music can reveal what’s not said in the dialogue, and it’s very mysterious. Did that change the way you approached the music? The opposition between the strong rhythms, the violent music and the softness of the oboe is able to change our perception of the character of the Other Mother. Neil Gaiman's Coraline is getting a musical adaptation composed by the sharp witted, velvety voiced For me, there are some colors I can’t write tonalities for, and some lighting I find impossible to put in music. Composer Bruno Coulais’s love of film is wide and deep, but there is one thing he hates: flat lighting. I recorded some operas there and I also worked with Mathilde Pellegrini, it’s easier to explain to the singer what to do in this studio, what I expected out of her performance. You might think this is a kid’s movie, but it’s every child’s nightmare. We were on the same page and had this great collaboration. What’s very interesting for a composer when working on an animated film is that the process is very long, so you can confront your opinion, but you also have the opportunity to change your mind and try something new. You are the first composer to have scored the first 3-D stop motion animated film ever made. He wanted Irish inspiration in my music. And, again, the lighting [of scenes] is very important – lighting, colors, everything under the story. There’s something about hearing the oboe, Christophe Grindel is a great French soloist, a soloist of the opera and orchestra. In it beginning it sounds very quiet and realistic because it’s a realistic world. 1. Also I used a lot of strange world instruments including a glass harmonica, water phones, various harps, chimes, glockenspiels, marimbas, and creative world percussion to give the soundscape a plucked personality. I don’t like war music if the composer takes a rhythm or a song from Africa and uses its beat to that idea; I think it’s not very honest. When I start to write music, I don’t have any ideas. Fantastic Garden 10. When he thinks back to the beginning of his composing career it can be a bit blurry, after all it’s been over thirty years since Coulais began as he remembers, “I can’t remember the titles of the first films I scored in the seventies. Definitely, I believe this music is from Henry. It was good because I had the time to change my mind, to change the orchestrations. It was important to create a strange dark theme, but also something moving, I wanted to create some emotion with the music for this character. It’s very important because the audience is extremely reactive to the music underscoring the first images. First of all I recorded the oboe in Budapest and it was great, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, not what I expected, so that’s why I asked Christophe to record it in a studio in Paris. He asked me to compose the music for his first documentary, then another one, and México mágico, after that I never stopped scoring films.” It was many years of hard work that led the composer to one of his greatest collaborations with multitalented director Henry Selick. For me, the light, the atmosphere of the movie needs special orchestrations, special tonalities, so it’s absolutely essential for me to control this aspect of composing. Lyricist. At the beginning the music is very normal, very quiet, and little by little it becomes scarier. It was very interesting for me because Kila did not read music, but after listening to my demos they were able to play everything with emotion and Irish ornamentations. I was very impressed by the quality of this film. I would send Henry my demos, and immediately I’d have an answer from him. It’s at this very moment when I’m able to understand if I’m even able to compose the music for his film. She recorded some elements of this music and we were looking for a singer for this song. Sheet music arranged for Piano/Vocal/Guitar, and Singer Pro in Eb Major. Then the inspiration will come. In Coraline I have a big orchestra, especially the string [section]. Coraline is a creepy story with plenty of disturbing images, a book that I would recommend only to the upper segment of the middle grade demographic (say, ages 11-12), and even at that only with close parental supervision. In Coraline when you hear the children’s voices it creates anxiety, it’s scary with fear and anguish. I wanted the music to be the same scale as the picture, very small. Opera “The question for the composer is how dark to go. You think the music is very light, but some element can disturb. Coraline (2009) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. For me it’s ‘the example’. When the change happened, French composer Bruno Coulais stepped in and mixed things up. But also James Joyce. Born in Paris, Coulais studied piano and violin before he was invited to score a short documentary, 1977’s Mexico Magico, by director Francois Reichenbach. I returned to Paris and part by part Henry sent me the actual cut of the film. Curiously we have a very close relationship. ! Yes, but it’s difficult to explain. At the end Henry told me, ‘I want to keep this voice,’ so we mixed the song with The Children’s Choir of Nice, Teri Hatcher, and my voice. The music and the film received great praise and won Coulais his third César award. The lighting of a film is so important. This part is so beautiful in Coraline, so strange, mysterious, that it was important for me in the beginning to start scoring the opening credits. Cartoon Song "End Credits" is a song from the 2009 stop-motion animated film Coraline that plays during the final credits of the movie (hence the song name). It’s very important for me. Then I met Henry in L.A., he sent me the animatics, and I started to create some themes and melodies. You can hear it in the last meeting between Coraline and her other mother, the contrast between the violence and softness. Where there’s light there’s darkness, twisted fantasies, creatures, and characters abound. I was very impressed by the quality of this film. I do my own orchestrations, so this changed with the timings as well. It was French composer Bruno Coulais calling me at 5:30pm from his office in Paris France, not his studio, but a place of solace where he writes his music and creates his demos. Afterwards Henry sent me an anamatic drawing with the structure of the movie and I started to imagine some demos with light orchestrations. Bruno Coulais is a French composer, born in Paris on 13 January 1954. The Sanza is a small thumb piano from Africa, you know this is very simple, but it was so strange to have this instrument underscore this part of the film mixed with a string orchestra. Coraline is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephin Merritt and a book by David Greenspan. With a thick French accent Bruno talked with me for over an hour about working with director Henry Selick, a film that took him two years of his life, and a unique approach that discovered the perfect music for Coraline. Over one hundred and forty film scoring projects to his name, Bruno Coulais is a French composer who was born in Paris on January 13th1954. Coraline is Coulais’s first American studio picture, and his idiosyncratic and transporting score is right up there in inventiveness with director Henry Selick’s rich, handcrafted world, writer Neil Gaiman’s complex characters, and the picture’s alternately subtle and startling 3D effects. With “Coraline,” the composer has taken another nontraditional approach: he’s written the show’s music for different types of pianos. Thankfully, another wall has come down for one of that continent’s most talented composers, as CORALINE’s stop-motion adventures have at last let Bruno Coulais’ Euro-centric talents go Hollywood in a big, magical way. Cinema changed my life; it changed my opinion about music, but the world too. Coraline SoundtrackDisclaimer: I don't own Coraline or any of the music. The emotion is the most important element, especially when you want to create fear, the audience has to be moved and the music can do that. This began an ongoing collaboration with Dayan that led to Les nuiteux (1994), Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1998), and Balzac (1999). You have a taste for opera, for the human voice, particularly children’s voices, and you can hear this in your score…. Composer. FilmInFocus' Scott Macaulay sits down with Coraline director Henry Selick to discuss stop motion, 3D and the future of animation. Forever a Feisty Eleven Year Old, Coraline Turns Eight, A remembrance of LAIKA's first stop-motion animated masterpiece. Okay, so that last part is kind of bizarre. I watch the sequence for a very long time and after I write the music I don’t remember or even watch the sequence or pictures, because using your memory is better. © 2020 Focus Features. For Coraline herself, Merritt composed for toy piano. Did you have to keep going back and changing your music because of the editing of the film? Artist and Writer: Bruno Coulais. In 2002 his name was found on the ending credits of the animation L’enfant qui voulait être un ours and also Genesis, while in 2004 he worked with Frédéric Schoendoerffer’s on Agents secrets. Is there even a world beyond the countryside around the house? The rights belong to Focus Features, LAIKA, and Bruno Coulais, respectively. I remember that we had three different tonalities for this song. It was important for me to keep a unity with my melodies, but to create a lot of variations little by little with the score and its orchestrations. It’s the sensation between the music, the lights, the characters, the set, everything is absolutely magic. The contrast is what brought out this character. Yes, that was the difficulty because they’d change the formula. At the beginning I read the script and I composed four or five themes, melodies, and then I met with Henry and he cared for these melodies. I tried to do something very special with the strings so there are a lot of glissandi and microtonalities. I sent Henry this demo with my horrible voice on it and I wasn’t very proud of this. He’s also scored Himalaya (1999), Les rivières pourpres (2000), Belphégor (2000), and Vidocq (2000). How rare is that? You also worked with Henry on Sirens of the Sea with Michele Mariana and bass player Bernard Paganotti. Quite often and especially at the end of the film you get the feeling that there is no world, only Henry Selick’s universe that pulls you into the pink hotel and its immediate surroundings. Scoring animation is nothing new for Coulais who composed music for one of his favorite scores to The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Bear (2002), then next a Swiss stop motion film Max & Co. (2007), and a creative collision in 2009 with Brendan Et Le Secret De Kells as he explains, “I also scored the animated French film Brendan Et Le Secret De Kells or The Secret of Kells. You have to spend some time to work with other cultures to achieve this. The second theme Henry was very happy with was The Other Mother’s Theme, for me she’s one of the most interesting characters in the movie. Coulais began his musical education on the violin and piano, aiming to become a composer of contemporary classical music. What are the most powerful parts of the film, where the score and story are one? I think he was looking for temp music and I don’t know why, but he tried the music I composed for Microcosmos and Winged Migration and he called me. Afterwards it’s like an open door, the process is very easy. Little by little I sent to Henry my demos of each sequence and very quickly he E mailed me his remarks. This theme was very important because many of the great directors really love their dark characters. these are not the actual lyrics so please don't flame me!! Coraline is a 2009 American stop-motion animated dark fantasy horror film directed and written for the screen by Henry Selick based on the 2002 novella of the same name by Neil Gaiman. This is the fate of Coraline in Neil Gaiman’s 2002 fantasy children’s novel of the same name, later a popular film and now an opera by Mark-Anthony … Bruno Coulais. Whether you’re listening to the darkness of the Children’s Choir of Niece on the End Credits or the magnificent orchestration of The Hand, a Mechanical Lullaby, Ghost Children, or the playfully mysterious Bobinsky, to the lurking and threatening Dangerous Garden, right from the beginning Bruno’s music inseparably celebrates Selick’s vision. It’s important for me to write my own orchestrations because when I think of melody, I think of it with the instruments I’ll write with. note: these are made up! What was different working with Henry compared to other directors you’ve worked with? With Coraline I found the atmosphere, the spirit I’ve been searching for in films for years. These performances and interpretations are so important, so special, and so magic, that you can’t obtain this with very good instrumentalists, so sometimes you need a soloist to obtain greater dynamics and more emotion. I prefer dark characters to happiness or to light characters. Since this film took three years to make and you worked on it for two, how did you work on the score as the film progressed, from a script, talking with Henry, seeing the film, or by storyboards? Stravinsky. After I write the score I eventually return to the sequence and use my software and samples to create demos with Logic Pro, Vienna Instruments (VSL), and other samples. What are some of the difficult parts of the film you worked on? Afterwards it’s like an open door, the process is very easy. In France I’m very lucky, I work on very interesting movies with very interesting directors, wonderful projects, but French movies are very realistic and the place of the music is not so important. How did you approach using the choir, the children’s choir, and the vocal soloist? I know how to get things done on a computer, and learn quickly. How rare is that? He wouldn’t give directions, but he was extremely clear and so precise when he explained what he wanted to obtain with the music. This single film, which highlighted Bruno’s music, was a great success and made Coulais one of the most demanded film composers in France. I used a string quartet, a lot of percussion, and there is a very special sequence -- the marching band of the mice circus -- where I tried to be at the scale of the mice, so I used toys and Chinese instruments along with traditional marching band instruments. Not too much, but for me there is an important correspondence between the lighting and the tonalities of the orchestration. Bobinsky 9. It absolutely changed the emotion of the music. 2000: Music for Tim Burton's "Stainboy" animated internet series commissioned by Shockwave.com (selections released on Warner Bros. Records' The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box in 2010). When Henry did an anamatic it was only with drawings. Exploration (from 'Coraline') Sheet Music. Prokofiev. The music and the film received great praise and won Coulais his third, Is the pink Victorian hotel and its surroundings all that exists in, On Monday January 18, 2010 at 8:30am Los Angeles time it was the beginning of the largest rain storm of the year, it started last night and became stronger as the week progressed. The film lures you with its extremely unconventional production values, led by Selick's distinctive visuals, and to accompany this striking look, French composer Bruno Coulais provides an appropriately bizarre score in his first Hollywood collaboration. Fortunately for Coulais, not all movies resemble an episode of Friends. As a musician new ideas are always happening, so I want to be able to change the music and be flexible. Very important, for example the bass, the sound that Bernard’s bass brings to this movie is a special effect, very strange and deep. I’m very proud of this sequence; it works perfectly because the music is in the same scale that the characters appear as. I've made 3 complete video games, Hundreds of hours of music, and just as many logos. Yes. Opera “The question for the composer is how dark to go. It was interesting to show with the music how she was a scary character but also to give her humanity and emotion. I used this in the movie [for the scenes with the] Other Mother. It’s a way of discovering the world and it’s why I hate temp music. Coraline proves otherwise." Yes, but I approach this very carefully. Where I recorded it wasn’t so important for the music; the most important element was the children’s choir that I recorded in Nice, France. For. I write the melody for the score, the harmony, details of the instrumentation. Coraline was nominated for seven other awards including a Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film and won for Best Animated Feature from The San Francisco Film Critics Circle. CORALINE also features a brand-new song by renowned funsters They Might Be Giants. This is why scoring. I think when you are very young, it’s the age of terror, of fear, so I think in movies when you use something very close to a childhood you create a fear, and a fantasy. Print and download Exploration sheet music from Coraline. Installation 4. You can’t just go to bed, go to sleep, and wake up in the real world free. It depends. I was given the opportunity to be extremely free because he wanted very experimental music, but at the end, and this is why Henry is such a great director, the score in this film is really Henry’s music. Because I am very lazy, when I have an idea I’m very happy to keep it! When I started to work in this world I discovered that movies are so different that they became an opening to the world. It was very easy, very quick and easy. I could hear the rain falling on my office skylights, it was dark outside like the ‘other world’ in, Coulais is the real thing, always searching for new philosophies and instrumentation to underscore a film and a composer who doesn’t even know how to deal with an orchestrator because he’s orchestrated every project he’s ever worked on. I'm great at VBA in excel, and I know SPSS like the back of my hand. I could hear the rain falling on my office skylights, it was dark outside like the ‘other world’ in Coraline, and my office phone rang. Then, little by little, I began to see construction of the film. All the classic composers. I was in conservatory then, in Paris, and a director, a great documentarian who was very famous in France, Francois Reichenbach, asked me to write music for a documentary about Mexico. I remember a sequence which they wanted me to score; it was the circus of mice with Bobinsky (Mice Circus). In this score you play the keyboards, Christophe Grindel is on the oboe, Helene Breschand plays the harp, and Bernard Paganotti is on the bass guitar. Bruno Coulais. It was very difficult for me to find a good way to do that. The Night of the Hunter is a unique movie, it’s a masterpiece. He has a father from Vendée and his mother is an Iraqi Jew. It was great to work on a fantasy, a nonrealistic film, with a creative director with so much imagination, it was magical. Henry is very courageous, a great director, in the beginning of the story Coraline’s world isn’t that special, and in fact Coraline is boring. Dreams When I started to work in this world I discovered that movies are so different that they became an opening to the world. For me, each movie is different from each other and the musician has to imagine new musical ideas, special music, and that’s only for one film. Composer Bruno Coulais’s love of film is wide and deep, but there is one thing he hates: flat lighting. You have a memory of the sequence and very often the music becomes closer to the film than when you are always composing with your eyes watching the picture. I used this Africa instrument called a Sanza with strings, the music and the sequence are definitely one element. Henry tried [putting] a lot of [temp] music with his drawings, his animatics, and I don’t know why, but he tried the music I made for a movie called Microcosmos, and it worked! Mathilde was the soloist and we had eight girl singers who were very young, but so gifted, you can do all you want to with the music by using the color of the Children’s Choir of Nice. How did the lighting of Coraline influence your compositions? The exciting music of Coulais brings the never ending internal world of Coraline to life. The largest turning point of Bruno’s career came in 1996, when he worked with directors Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou on the documentary Microcosmos. He is most widely known for his music on film soundtracks. It’s a metallic percussion where you put water on a kind of basin with a tube and a bowl. Installation. It was actually the last part of the score that I wrote for Coraline. And when I find the way, I am able to work a lot, all the day and night. Sometimes he was able to create fear with very emotional music. Sometimes Henry wanted something different, he wanted to change some aspect of the music, but we’d always work it out and the music became much better. A Comcast Company. There’s the little girl, her parents, her friend Wybie, a black cat, and the quirky tenants in the pink house, but once Coraline enters the small door into an unsuspecting parallel world, a completely new and appealing life becomes an illusive temptation as its overwhelming evil powers unleash themselves to possess the little girl’s life forever. Ten years ago, I had a house in Corsica, and in France we have a lot of documentaries about Corsica on TV. Recent projects have included his Stabat Mater in Saint Denis Cathedral with the participation of English musician Robert Wyatt. After this we wanted to work from the beginning to the end of the film because the music had to change, had to transform, and that’s where the ambience of the film changed, the lighting became darker in the other world. 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