Music is extremely vital to story telling, it sets the emotional tone, letting you know how to feel about what you are seeing, and it does this on a non-cognitive level, going "under your skin" - music moves us. In addition to setting an emotional tone for different parts of the film, ranging from dark and empty to joyous and vibrant, I also wanted to come up with music that said "Emelia", that could capture her personality and be immediately identified as "Emelia's theme". So I began collaborating with composer Sean Beeson to find that perfect "Emelia theme".

It took a lot of blood sweat and tears to do. Sean came up with tons of different compositions before we finally arrived at the final version. It is a similar process to movie making and story telling. The story line to Emelia also had multiple drafts, and deleted scenes. They call that "killing your darlings". It is hard to do, because as an artist you love the work you have crafted, but you need to be ruthless and press to get to the best you can make. I think when you listen to Sean's final theme, you'll agree that it was worth it:



PLAY EMELIA'S THEME

For the final scene of the movie, I wanted to have a more rock oriented song that would fit together with the tone established in Emelia's Theme. For this I turned to the music of Los Straitjackets and their monster surf music song "Rockula" which you can hear a sample of below. Be sure to visit their official website too where you can hear other music samples and see more nice pictures.

PLAY ROCKULA

Los Straitjackets in a lovely photo by the Sears Portrait Center

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