Newsletter #4 - The Midwinter Specials

Kia ora everyone! 

This week airs the massive midwinter specials of Shortland Street, three insane episodes dropping on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, featuring some intense drama, and some intense music. 

These episodes consumed my life for a couple of weeks. These crazy episodes end up being wall-to-wall music for about 2/3rds of them. There are almost forty minutes of music in these episodes, basically an album's worth of material.

If you are curious about what kind of stuff I do for Shortland Street, tomorrow is the night to tune in! The easiest way to watch is for free on TVNZ on Demand.

A complex trilogy of episodes

...Lives will be lost when Shortland Street descends into chaos as a threat infiltrates the hospital.

Despite being far more musically complex than a normal bunch of episodes, we still had to work to the same very tight deadlines as normal. Fortunately knowing that this was going to be a massive week, I got the episodes' rough cuts early so that I could start sketching music in the week leading up to the episodes, but to get it all done in time required some long hours.

To make these three episodes special they don't feature the Shortland Street theme music or standard credit music -- they feature a custom theme I've written specially for them. 

One thing to listen out for during these episodes is the whistling recordings I did for these episodes. I needed a unique musical sound for a certain mysterious and ominous character in these episodes, so I turned to my brother, Lachlan, who is quite a talented whistler. He became the unquie signifying sound of this forboding figure, and is a prominent feature of the score in the specials.

What is coming up?

Next week Shortland Street continues with another musical set of episodes as the characters deal with the tragic implications of the midwinter specials. The intense action music of this week will give way to sad moving cello music. 

Moving away from Shortland Street, I have a few other recently completed short films which I am looking forward to sharing. One is an epic fantastical historical short called The Death of Hector, which features blasting horns and chugging strings. The other is a short documentary called The Generation Gardener about a local bonsai artist (directed by my good friend Luke Ross) and features a charming celeste and the incredible clarinet playing of Joshua Buckler. I will keep you in the loop about these as they develop. 

Thanks so much for reading!