The Education of Charlie Banks
We used a more traditional orchestration for this film set in the early 1980's and shot on the campus of Brown University and Greenwich Village. This was a story about the lucky and the unlucky in birth and life. There was a sweetness to the story that required mostly strings and woods. I used a cimbalom similar to the one we used in Blue Man Group and tuned the lowest two strings to the two intervals that I would modulate back and forth. This was accompanied by some large Native American drums, that are basically hollowed out tree stumps. These low organic sounds provided gravity and masculinity that when laid under the strings and woods and performed in an odd meter, gave the sense of instability, danger and haunt to what would otherwise be a sweet sounding score.
