We (The BENTMEN) did the music for MOTAZ.
We wrote over five hours of music for the film without seeing a single frame of footage -- just going by Ted's synopsis, a few stills on his site and our own imaginations.
When the band got the final cut, we laid out the primary scenes and characters on a grid and started working in a
leitmotif fashion -- mixing and matching the music with the major themes, rather like paint by numbers. The entire score was assembled on a G4 Powerbook in Adobe Premiere.
The BENTMEN are known for being a very heavy rock band, and while there is ample proof of that in the film, we also wanted to take the opportunity to branch out into some different musical realms in which we don't often get to play. Accordingly, we approached a number of sessions as "chamber music," with small sub-sections of the group performing.
Of course, once we merged the music from our giant misshapen rubber heads with the actual film, the tracks just landed the way they did because of their proximity to one important cue or another. We would align the musical hit with the action, then lengthen the duration at either end to fit as needed and crossfade between the tracks before and after.
This led to some of the most interesting moments for us as a band, which were the accidental collages that result from interpolating two or more pieces together that hadn't been originally conceived that way, but were made so by the necessities of the plot.
We also did all the sound effects for the movie. Every gunshot, every machete chop, door slam, ringing phone, along with ambient background sounds, individual sounds for every type of device in the alien's lab had to be manually inserted and aligned with frame-accuracy.
It was, frankly, a colossal task, but we had a blast.
Ted’s primary direction to us was that we leave no dead spots in the movie -- fill it with as much music as possible -- and to treat it as "serious camp," in other words, nothing jokey about the tone.
In fact, the only intentional joke we put in was using the sound of a modem as part of the titular "Mark" administered by Zekith and the Bad Aliens. Judging from the copious amount of duct tape and styrofoam in their spaceship, we felt it likely these guys were using a dial-up connection!
We had a blast doing the score for this movie and Ted is a joy to work for. So we hope you enjoy this big, loud, bloody, ridiculous, rock 'n' roll comic book of a movie, and as always, stay Bent!
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