Watchmen, Chapter 1 – The World’s Finest Interviews Tim Kelly

WF: What did your scoring process actually look like? Were you working from rough cuts, storyboards, or something else?

TK: I was given ample time to work with Brandon on themes and had access to the early animatics. I got updates of animatics throughout the process, so I was able to sketch most of the music before I received a locked cut. This meant I had to go back and edit some of the music after I received the locked cut. But generally, the timings for the animatics were pretty close to the timings of the final version thanks to Brandon’s clear vision from the beginning of what he wanted.

WF: Synthesizers and electronic music are clearly key to your approach to scoring Watchmen. What was the idea behind using synth as the score’s main driver? Did it seem like a natural choice, given the source material and its setting?

TK: It did feel like a natural choice for us since we both love electronic music, it seemed like a synthesizer palette would fit in with the source material, and some of the movies we both revered from the late ‘70s and 1980s also had scores that featured analog synthesizers. When Brandon started sending me early stills of the animation style that was to be his interpretation of the original comic, I knew a synth-driven approach to scoring was going to work well with the look he was going for.

WF: A somewhat related follow-up – did you handle the music for the in-world TV programs, commercials, or other diegetic elements? That must’ve required a different creative approach.

TK: The diegetic elements were handled traditionally, stylistically predictable and in character, which is unlike the scoring style we had settled on. This required a different approach to composing and orchestrating than for a classic analog synth score, and it allowed me to wear different hats, stylistically speaking, which is something I’ve been fortunate to have had lots of experience with throughout my career.

It’s worth mentioning that some of the source music purposefully blurred the lines between score and source. Besides helping to place a sequence in a particular time period, we used source to play against picture to create an unsettling mood. You can see this in the violent scene with the Comedian and Silk Spectre I in the first movie, and when the thugs beat up Hollis Mason in the second. The source music I wrote had a sweet and sentimental quality which effectively made those horribly violent scenes feel even more disturbing.

WF: How closely did you work with the director or editors? Was the placement of music collaborative, or were you mostly working independently?

TK: I worked primarily with Brandon on placement and style, and it was a collaborative effort. For many of the scenes, he had a specific musical mood and approach in mind and gave me examples for reference. Even though Brandon isn’t a musician, he loves music, has great instincts and communicates his ideas very well. We had initial spotting sessions and discussed the in and out points before I started writing. Sometimes those points moved, depending on how they felt to us, after I gave Brandon my first demos with the animatics.

WF: Some sequences cut between very different tones, like the Dr. Manhattan interview cross-cut with the alley fight. How do you approach scoring scenes like that? Do you try to musically unify them, or treat them separately? There’s also a dissonance in scenes where visuals and narration clash, for example, Dr. Manhattan walking through an army base while another character reads Tales of the Black Freighter. Which element do you score for in a moment like that? Were there moments where you had to basically choose who you were scoring?

TK: The technique of cutting between the Tales of the Black Freighter story and what was happening in the larger Watchmen story came right out of the comic book. This is also true for the sequence with Manhattan in the TV studio and the alley fight, which you mentioned. Brandon’s vision for these particular sequences was to amplify the parallel arc of the two stories/scenes as they simultaneously developed, through editing and motion, in a way that would only be possible with animation. I think this was handled brilliantly.

The larger Watchmen story and the survivor’s story have a loose connection. It has been suggested that the survivor’s predicament resembles Veidt’s, and in places the two stories seem to be commenting on each other. There’s a sense that the events and tension in both stories keeps building toward a certain inevitability, which gives a shared continuity to them. So, finding the one right tone to enhance this continuity with music was my goal. I didn’t really favor one character or scene over the other in terms of the cuts. With a few exceptions, I played through those scenes trying to capture the emotional essence of what was happening in any given moment.

WF: “Manhattan on Mars” is a beautiful piece. It starts hopeful, cosmic, even serene, but slowly turns ambiguous, even ominous. Is it tricky to write music that requires crossing over different emotions and story beats in such a short span? It must require precise work.
 
TK: The track “Manhattan on Mars” is one part of the long and complex sequence for Dr. Manhattan’s backstory. Other tracks on the soundtrack album from that sequence are “A Sudden Sense of Deja Vu,” “Manhattan Reassembled,” and “Manhattan Rises.” I broke this music up into smaller sections for the soundtrack album because a single track with all the music together would’ve been over 14 minutes!

I am well acquainted with composing music that changes rapidly through many different moods and styles within a short time span thanks to all of my experience writing for comedic animated shows. In those shows, it’s always a challenge to write something that sounds like a self-contained piece of music when heard independently of the picture, but still syncs up perfectly with the sometimes manic world of comedy animation.

This was no less of a challenge for composing the Watchmen scores. The nature of the style we had chosen for scoring – classic analog synth film scores from the 1970s and 1980s – is inherently slow-moving and creates drama through broad sweeps. Hitting all of the dramatic beats while being true to this style, especially when they happened in a short space of time, often meant minimizing musical elements, making the most of very subtle changes and spending a lot of time carefully mixing the music. At times, it felt like a creative puzzle to be solved, and I enjoyed the process immensely.

WF: Were there any unforeseen challenges in the scoring process, like technical issues, creative blocks, or things that caught you off guard? Was there a cue that gave you more trouble than expected?

TK: The accident sequence in the first movie, with Jon Osterman in the locked test vault, titled “A Sudden Sense of Deja Vu” on the soundtrack album, was a tough cue. We needed a gut-wrenching sense of tragedy for this sequence and my initial demos weren’t helping to dig out that feeling enough. After trying several different versions, Brandon and I decided we would try breaking the “rule” that my score consist of 100% synthesizer sounds.

To achieve a more tragic and human element for this sequence, and in other places in Manhattan’s back story, I went for a hybrid style of scoring, incorporating some traditional orchestral instruments like strings and horns. I was careful to EQ and mix them in with the synthesizers in a way that would help them blend better with the synths. The effect of this hybrid style worked to emphasize the emotion and tragedy in Manhattan’s backstory while keeping synth sounds as the primary read in the musical palette.

WF: Is there a particular moment or cue in the film you’re especially proud of, either because of how it turned out or how it came together?

TK: There’s a sequence on Mars in the second movie where Dr. Manhattan tells Laurie he changed his mind about humanity. He decides human life is miraculous, and as his dialog/voiceover progresses, there are a series of shots that move farther and farther out in space until we are looking at a beautiful image of the whole universe. I’m very happy with how that cue, which is titled “You Changed My Mind” on the soundtrack, turned out. It’s one of the only bright and hopeful moments in either of the movies, and I thought the music did a particularly good job of supporting both the dialog and images.

WF: As we start to wrap this up, what’s the first track you’d recommend folks checkout when they pick up the soundtrack?

TK: I think “Watchmen World” would make a good first track to check out. It’s a good overall representation of the style I was going for in the scores.

WF: Lastly, do you have any current or upcoming projects you’d like to fill us in on?