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This is a film I scored for Campus Movie Fest.


Please watch it and share it if you enjoyed it because there’s a competition going on to get the most views. If our film wins, my team and I can go to Hollywood for the CMF weekend there!


Here is a very brief glimpse of my article about Henry Jackman and his score for the animated film Turbo. This appears in the July 2013 issue of Film Score Monthly Online.

By Kristen Romanelli

Between the end of the world and super-powered mollusks, Henry Jackman has hit the summer of 2013 at top gear. Seth Rogan’s apocalyptic comedy This Is the End premiered in June, featuring Jackman’s score as the film’s “straight man.” Before we see him team-up with Matthew Margeson in mid-August for Kick-Ass 2, Jackman ventures once more into the world of animation in Turbo, opening in mid-July. Does the man ever sleep? “Occasionally,” he says, laughing. “I’ve just been really lucky with getting loads of opportunities, so at the moment I’m not saying no. When you’re writing and you’re enjoying it, then I think you don’t notice how many hours you sleep. I think if I looked at the amount of hours I’ve been working, it’s probably a hideous total, but you don’t count the hours because you’re too busy writing music.”

Turbo is the tale of a common garden snail, Theo, who dreams of racing in the Indy 500, that pinnacle of speed and perhaps the most out-of-reach desire for such a humble, sluggish creature. “It’s kind of the classic underdog story,” Jackman explains. “In a funny way, if you take away all the cars and the racing, it sort of reminds me of Babe or Rocky, where you’ve got a character who really believes he can do something and no one else takes the slightest bit of notice and, in fact, that character’s mocked.” After a particularly harsh day of being teased by the other snails in the tomato garden and a close encounter with a lawn mower, the racecar-obsessed escargot takes a “walk” in the rain and makes a wish as he looks out over an L.A. freeway: I wish I was fast. A freak accident knocks our hero onto the hood of car drag racing in the dry culvert of the L.A. river, where he gets sucked into the engine and then flooded with nitrous oxide. “Thanks to a superhero-style transformation towards the beginning of the movie,” says Jackman, “his fantasies suddenly are available to him.” In a sequence reminiscent of Spider-Man’s metamorphosis, Theo changes, on a molecular level, into “Turbo.”

Jackman was involved with Turbo from the very early stages of the production, collaborating with writer/director David Soren before any animation had taken place. “Unlike a live action picture, Turbo was kind of a slow burner, being an animated film. You get to see early on how it works,” says Jackman. “David took me to a sort of ‘ideas cube’ that looked a bit like an analogue version of Minority Report where he had storyboards and character art all over the walls, and he sat me down and took me through the story of Turbo. So I got very excited about that even though I hadn’t really seen any footage.”

It was in these early meetings that Jackman and Soren laid out the musical needs of the film, and the first theme began to emerge. “Early on, we figured out that, as well as having all the racing elements and cool stuff, it was really important to come up with the ‘Dreamer’ theme—an aspirational theme that would play more towards story and the yearning and the reaching. And that would pay real dividends because even though there’s really exciting racing, there’s all these character arcs of a creature that’s trying to imagine he can do something that he can’t. Regardless of whether that’s racing or anything else, that’s really an archetypal story about aspiration and dreaming.”

Jackman wrote what he calls the “Dreamer” theme on the piano “way before thinking about orchestration or colors or textures or anything like that because there needed to be a coherent, thematic piece that just should work on its own more than anything else. The advantage of that is that you can sprinkle that at the appropriate moments and really harmonize it and change it, and you can feel that there’s this underlying motif even if the arrangement, orchestration, color and harmonic context change.”

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