When The Director Had To Follow the Sound Guy...

In 2005 I was facing one of my biggest music challenges. MTV had decided to award Tom Cruise an award for contributing 20 years of great movie music which hit the charts, including MTV and they wanted a 5 minute video made in tribute to him, featuring the major hits from his movies.

So a team of guys was assembled who started to edit clips together from his movies and the basic music themes were picked.

The problem, well the sound design from the 80's stuff just, well... wasn't sounding very contemporary any more, AND everything was at a different tempo so it created a problem for the rhythm aspect of the edit.

What to do?

Well, remixing was already an established term back in 2005 and time-stretching was something which could now be done without terrible digital artifacts, so I went on a quest to try to amass as much original elements to this songs as I could, which in many cases proved impossible in the time frame we had.

Being a very dexterous guy with Pro Tools I started the long process of changing each song so it had a "sound" more pertinent to 2005 and each song flowed into the next in the same tempo while mixing and sound designing each into one cohesive whole.

The end result? Well, you judge:


Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVDTser-Zs0