“Ex Machina” by Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow

My clean-cut plan to raise visitor stats from last week’s blog post seemed to work. All facts at hand are providing a strong suspicion that at least one of my two additional visitors was redirected here through those cleverly placed hashtags. To calm the crowd I immediately follow up this week with a not-so-popular soundtrack. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the bulk of film music fans couldn’t care less about an electronic score like Ex Machina. But I do. In my book it’s an absolute benchmark when it comes to audio post-production. Alex Garland’s directorial debut is an amazing, downright incredible visual experience, but combined with the musical score from…

“9” by Deborah Lurie, Danny Elfman

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re recording a thoughtful and highly entertaining in-depth podcast about the Deborah Lurie/Danny Elfman score 9. How do you make sure people are actually stumbling upon your work? It’s not like Shane Acker’s film was anywhere near the hottest shit coming out in 2009. And popular search results on Google or YouTube may vary wildly depending on your personal browser history. So this may be a very ungrateful soundtrack to tackle. Yet here I am, adding another 9-movie-related website no-one’s ever gonna find beneath the gazillions of dumb mind candy clickbait à la “9 Insane…

“Tale of Tales” by Alexandre Desplat

Some months ago I’ve published a blog post dedicated to Jeff Cardoni’s Silicon Valley. It was a rather unusual entry to my ever-growing portfolio, because there simply has never been any soundtrack release to use my custom cover with. It was all hypothetical and people kept asking me, why I’ve spent my precious time on a project that obviously served no purpose. Well, guess what… I did it again! The music to Alexandre Desplat’s Il Racconto dei Racconti (Tale of Tales) has never been released commercially. Not even as a bootleg. There’s a badly edited suite available online to give you…

“Angels & Demons (Deluxe Edition)” by Hans Zimmer

Once again I’ve collaborated on an unofficial “Deluxe Edition” made by my dear friend SonicAdventure. This time it was an expanded edition of Hans Zimmer’s Angels & Demons. When he was done with mixing and mastering Sonic came to me for some suggestions on his own custom covers and we discussed various design aspects. One of those topics were the ambigrams of typography professor and distinguished expert in fine art, Mr. John Langdon. Langdon, who by the way served as a template for Dan Brown’s main character in his ongoing Robert Langdon book series, had come up with various logos for Angels & Demons and I suggested…

“Arrival” by Jóhann Jóhannsson

[This entry is brought to you by the wondrous magic of Adobe Photoshop] When I first laid eyes upon the set of teaser posters for Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi brainer Arrival I was immediately struck in awe. It happens rarely that I fall in love with a film poster at first sight, but I just lost myself in those amazing still-lives with their gorgeous colours and lighting. So much so that I could even ignore some of the choppy Photoshop actions in there. Furthermore BLT Communications, widely regarded as a leading player in the business, got into hot water with a…