Scoring Music for Film, T.V. and Gaming by Jerry Merrill
A Shared Passion...
Your audience is taking a journey through the emotion and meaning you've created. You've sculpted each scene carefully, and no nuance has been missed.
The music for that journey should be created with the same intense passion. A passion that we share.
The Original Score
Composer's Influences...
Inspirational Film Music
Great moments in scoring...
Just as any pop artist's sound is heavily influenced by other artists who have inspired them, composers have similar footprints of influence on how they work and the music that is the result. I think that you can tell a lot about a composer by examining those influences.
So I've made some comments and put together a short video to illustrate some of the moments on the silver screen that have inspired me.
One cut I have not had the time to put in the video is a great moment from Edward Scissorhands by Danny Elfman.
Danny Elfman seems to be the influence most people hear in my work right away, and there's more than a passing reason for that. Elfman and I come from similar backgrounds. Like him I was a performing keyboard player, and connect to the wackier enjoyment side of music, but reviews of my jazz piano style often invoke comparisons to the 'cracked-bell' tonalities of Grusin and Evans. Take kooky road keyboard player and give him 'cracked bell' harmonic sensibilities and that pretty much sums up myself and Elfman.
I'll work on getting that cut from Scissorhands included in this video, I really enjoy it every time I watch the film.
H. Zimmer - Last Samurai
Inspirational Film Music
Hans Zimmer - Last Samurai
Hans Zimmer - and all the writers he has working with him - consistently write inspiring music. The soundtrack for Inception was an amazing experience, and has inspired me very recently. But I am thinking about a scene from The Last Samurai.
This is the morning as Tom Cruise's character arises to head off to battle, and quite probably death. His Japanese female host, the sister of his former enemy and captor, is waiting for him, and dresses him for battle. There's much more to this scene, but it's not necessary for me to spoil the film to hear the impact that the music has on the emotion of this moment.
I understand that James Horner was the original choice for this score, but was already too busy that year. I can understand why that selection would be made. The foreign ethnic instrument sound is considered one of Horner's strengths, but it seems that Zimmer and his team were inspired and created the ethnic feel in their own 'Zimmer-esque' way, and I think it's stunning. In this cue it is the portamento on the violin that does the trick for me, and it is stunning. A truly deep, undercurrent of passion in this scene, because of the music.
M. Jarre - Lawrence Of Arabia
Inspirational Film Music
1962 - Lawrence Of Arabia by M. Jarre
I realize that it's quite cliche for a composer to talk about the work of Maurice Jarre on Lawrence Of Arabia as an inspirational influence.
Indulge me. It was after all, an extremely important release in 1962, the Queen of England attended the premier, it won best picture in 63, and by the time I was a child it was on television for me to get an eye and earful.
Later I learned that Jarre had only 6 weeks in which to write the entire score, adding to the 'miracle' as Spielberg puts it. Nonetheless, Jarre captures an emotion in a new and unique way in this score that is inspiring and reminds all composers everywhere to push the envelope.
A. Silvestri - Grumpier Old Men
Inspirational Film Music
Alan Silvestri - Grumpier Old Men
Alan Silvestri has an incredible body of work, there is no question.
One of the things that could be said about Silvestri is that his work is consistently great. Such is the case in a little funny film I enjoy - the sequel film Grumpier Old Men. There's this scene that gets me every time I watch it, and the reason it does is because of Silvestri's music.
Everything in the cue, the chord progression, the modulations, the orchestral progression from piano and strings through woodwinds, english horn to mellow brass is all classic by-the-book Silvestri.
Of particular note is the strong theme right up front, gradually disintegrating into fragments in order to give mood and color but not distract from the scene. It just draws a tear from me every time.
Jerry Merrill
Composer in residence - Burbank, CA
Gaming...
Jerry lives and composes at his Burbank, California home studio, ten minutes from Hollywood. There he composes, records, mixes, masters, and edits soundtracks.
Developing for games - Not only Music, but Dialogue, SFX, and Foley; Editing, Mixing, Mastering and Programming - are unique tasks for games. Jerry has worked in these roles on many titles, including:
[click the photo for an in-depth biography]
Classical Child Prodigy. Jazz Pianist. Songwriter, Composer, Producer. From age four, Jerry has been writing music. Over forty years of immersion in the language of emotion has given Jerry an instantaneous and intuitive connection through music to listeners everywhere, regardless of style or medium.
Jerry Merrill, Composer..Starting life as a prodigy, Jerry wrote his first musical piece - a pentatonic melody over an ostinato accompaniment - at age three. He began piano lessons at age five, studying with composer Norma Lyon by age eight. By the time he was ten, Jerry was performing as a classical child prodigy along the east coast, and soon began studying jazz piano and theory under Maestro Orlando Otey.
Supplementing his piano performance private study with theory and composition became the accelerating path for young Jerry, and by the time he was fifteen he had attended summer programs at Juilliard and Berklee, eventually coming under the musical mentoring of Dr. Jack N. Kimmell, where he broadened his musical horizons to include vocal performance, advanced arranging and orchestration, and began composing in may varying styles and idioms. At sixteen Jerry was asked by a friend to produce a three-song demo in the recording studio, which he arranged, orchestrated, and contracted the musicians.
This work continued through high school, where Jerry began writing original modern pieces for choir, broadway-style revue shows, and jazz ensemble charts, in addition to performing with many musical groups on many instruments. By eighteen Jerry was proficient at eight instruments, and writing constantly.
Over the next seven years Jerry received multiple awards, grants, and scholarships to music departments first at the community college level, and then state universities, where he continued to contribute to recording, popular, classical and theatrical musical groups by writing, arranging, composing, and performing. He also continued to meet and study with many musical greats including Charles Lewis, Dave Brubeck, and Gene Puerling.
Jerry scored his first film - an independent film by a friend - at twenty-five. He was hooked on creating music to images, and scored his next film live to picture six months later.
Jerry's work in the recording studio made him an exceptional engineer, and thus equipped to become a producer on many recordings throughout his life. Songwriting, Composing, Arranging, Producing, Engineering and/or Performing on recordings with Gladys Knight, Bonnie Raiit, Jimmy Buffet, Burt Bacharach, Stewart Copeland, Andy Summers and many others.
Jerry made a film about a live musical event in Havana Cuba, which premiered at the 2000 Latin American Film Festival in Havana Cuba, and eventually became re-edited as the Universal release Bridge To Havana.
Jerry moved into the gaming industry, working on two Ubisoft Tom Clancy games, then EA Games for the creation of Lord Of The Rings, The Third Age, Battle For Middle Earth, and The Godfather titles.
At present, he lives in Burbank, CA, songwriting, composing, producing and recording music for film, television and live performances, and developing various film and T.V. projects. He also provides consulting services to companies in many areas of his expertise. He works often with Los Angeles members of the Film Music Network, and continues to integrate with the scoring community at large, occasionally getting out of the studio to attend lectures and seminars by agents and music supervisors, songwriting conventions by BMI and ASCAP, and talks by composers, arrangers and orchestrators, including Film Music Institute'sScott Smalley.
It's very important to constantly check out what other people are doing- what the state of the art is. Not just the technology, although that is a big part, but stylistic approaches change often in scoring as well. Even how far you can push the envelope with innovation is constantly shifting - sometimes you can get very experimental, and sometimes the client wants to keep things very commercially recognizable. If you don't keep listening to what's going on, you can get boxed in quickly.
About the studio...
The Burbank Studio
Good things come in small packages...
A few blocks from downtown Burbank, the home studio of composer Jerry Merrill sports a complete set of tools for modern and traditional scoring, including ten computers, digital console, HD recording hardware, multiple software DAW applications and virtual instrument libraries.
Part of the unique sound of this studio is the combination of modern processing equipment alongside an abundance of tube audio processors by Drawmer, Avalon and Manley.
The largest music work I have produced here was a 137-track theme song for an indie film. It was fun to put that all together, and remarkable that it did not come close to topping out the capabilities of the studio. I remember the 'old days' - cutting two-inch analogue tape in order to piece together takes, so every once in a while I reminisce and feel very lucky that technology has come this far.
The studio also has an HD video editing suite, with web media encoding, and DVD and Internet authoring tools for Flash, Java, PHP and XHTML. Local work storage arrays are enclosures with four-terabyte, level ten RAIDs, while internet and FTP servers provide five hundred gigabytes of private, secure 'cloud' and high-speed transfer to clients.
The technical abilities of the studio mean that I can provide what clients need, accommodating the most modern collaborative work flows, along with stringent production schedules.
The Godfather I+II
http://www.godfather2.ea.com/ EA's Lord Of The Rings, BME
http://games.ea.com/lordoftherings/ EA's Lord Of The Rings, TTA
http://games.ea.com/lordoftherings/ Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon JS
http://www.ubi.com/US/Games/Info.aspx?pId=653 Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
http://splintercell.us.ubi.com/ Rainbow Six, Ravenshield
http://www.ubi.com/US/Games/Info.aspx?pId=664 Collaborative Creation
Jerry and his support team, in addition to a close creative family of friends and associates can completely source your needs if you desire...Whether you want to delegate the creation of a compelling score to a single-source, or are assembling your own 'dream team' of creative professionals to work together, we can help your project arrive at the inspired, artistic completion you desire.
We look forward to working closely with additional members of your creative team to construct the compelling soundscape you've envisioned.
We know that collaborations can provide creative depth and diversity to every level of production, and we work well in this environment.
Click Image For Game Video...
Here are some links of our favorite people and organizations - or simply important resources for the scoring music industry. You should take the time to check them out and see what they're doing as well.