This was a joint ABC/PBS documentary with correspondent Michel Martin looking at four violent youth offenders in the California Prison System.

Because the environment was full of hard surfaces, I composed the score using a lot of metallic and hard wood sounds. To convey the idea of "doing time," all tempos were at 120 beats per minute and several incorporated the sound of a ticking clock as a timekeeper. This was actually a difficult job because there were internal tension between the producers and the correspondent as to whether using music supported the drama or took away form its pure documentary approach. In the end, little of what I wrote actually made it to the air.

In retrospect, I think the music I wrote was very effective in conveying the drama and millieu of the narrative, and I remain very proud of the work.

I have written music for a few films, primarily shorts and documentaries. Here are some examples of underscoring, where music is written to convey emotional context in support of action and/or dialog onscreen. One of my favorite projects was writing the score for Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror (Wellspring Films), which was narrated by Meryl Streep. During the purges of Jozef Stalin during the late 1930s, thousands of people in the Ukraine went missing. It wasn't until perestroika in the early 1990s that people could re-inter the bodies of their loved ones or even just discuss the mass killings. This documentary follows Ukranians as they struggle to come to terms with the effects of the Purges fifty years later.

I chose to score this film for string trio (violin, viola & cello). This seemed appropriate for the narrative and was consistent with the unobtrusive and sensitive way that the documentary was shot. The strings were able to convey the authentic pathos of the story without overwhelming it.

I wore a number of hats for the film Some Jobs Are Simple (Dead On Films). The Director, Jim Evans, inititally asked to help him with the sound for the film. Even though the film is only 14 minutes long, there was quite a bit of dialog cleanup and voice matching involved, due to the limited budget and lack of good quality mics available on the two days of the shoot.

Once dialog was finished, I edited sound effects for the film. There are a number of hard effects, such as gunshots, glass clinking, and Foley sounds, that have to line up with onscreen events. In addition, there were several wild FX and ambiences that were created to add authenticity.

At this point, I was inspired to write a title song, Some Jobs Are Simple, that distills the essence of the film and delivers it in a wry, but smooth, Bossa Nova style. The song was recorded by The Beeps and was used for the end titles of the film. A stripped down instrumental version was also used during the opening credits and a third version was looped for the menu page of the DVD release. Finally, I was the rerecording engineer for the film, mixing the music, dialog and effects for the film.

I also edited Sound FX for the five-second animated logo for Dead On Films. I enjoyed working on all of the various phases of the project and feel that I've established a great ongoing relationship with the filmmaker. As of this writing, the film itself has been selected as a finalist in six film festivals in Florida, Texas, Long Island and New York City.