Newsletter #12 - Cues, Tunes, & Ballet Shoes!
Kia ora everyone,
It’s been a busy couple of months since my last newsletter at the end of June. It’s great to be leaving winter behind as we head into spring!
Dazzlehands Soundtrack Release
The Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Dazzlehands was a huge success! This charming 40-minute children’s show, featuring six dancers, ran at the Soundings Theatre in Te Papa during July.
I’m excited to announce that the soundtrack is now available on Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and other platforms. You can dance along at home here. The music of Dazzlehands is fun and energetic, with genre-bending elements and some amazing saxophone solos from Joshua Blucker.
CANZ Composer's Workshop with the NZSO
This month, I had the incredible experience of workshopping my music with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the CANZ Composers Workshop.
It was a really fascinating experience, some of what I had planned worked extremely well, while other parts needed to be reworked. It was great having the chance to experiment and try things out.
I attended the workshop with an incredible cohort of other composers and musicians, all of whom were really inspiring and interesting, which made it all the more rewarding.
48-Hour Film Festival Award
In my last newsletter, I mentioned that our team had been nominated for Best Music at the Wellington regional finals of the 48-Hour Film Festival. Since then, we not only won that award, but we also took home the Best Music award at the Grand National Finals! To win this across the entire competition—570 teams in total—is an amazing honour, and I’m absolutely thrilled.
Peter Jackson even highlighted our film as one of his six favourites from the competition. You can watch our film below.
Claire Cowan Soundtrack Release
Composing legend Claire Cowan has released a new soundtrack for the documentary Jean Cocteau, which explores the life of the French surrealist. You can listen to the album here.
I was lucky to be a part of the recording process, assisting with Pro Tools during the session at the Stella Maris Chapel in Wellington. It felt like getting the band back together, as we’d previously recorded her ballet Hansel & Gretel in the same chapel with John Neill in 2020.
Recording Hansel & Gretel with Claire in 2020.
An Hour of Shortland Street
An hour-long special of Shortland Street airs on Monday, October 7th. Though I can’t reveal too much, it’s a particularly dramatic episode that required a lot of music, which made it a challenging but rewarding project. I’m looking forward to seeing it air!
Recently, I also shared a behind-the-scenes snapshot of myself playing the cello lines for a montage in Shortland Street. After recording several takes, I edited, transformed, and even doubled them with synths. For any cello players out there, you might notice that I played the opening line an octave higher than it sounds, I was experimenting and playing around with pitch shifting the cello recordings, and I ended up liking the sound.