If you read the last music and film post, you know that music can have an incredible effect on the way we, as audience members, perceive movies and the events that happen in them (although this may happen subliminally). Now think about the composers themselves and what their job is in the production of the film. Scoring a film with the perfect soundtrack is not an easy task. Two of the most popular and talented film composers of our time are John Williams and Hans Zimmer.
John Williams is a film and classical composer that composed the music for many famous films such as: Jaws, Star Wars, E.T., Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, E.T., Harry Potter, Schindler’s List, Lincoln, and more. For his work, Williams has won five Oscars, two Emmys, three Golden Globes, and eighteen Grammys. John Williams has worked with Steven Spielberg numerous times to create some very memorable films. (There are only two instances in which Spielberg did a movie that Williams did not score: Twilight Zone: The Movie and The Color Purple.) After working on Jaws, Spielberg recommended Williams to George Lucas, who directed the Star Wars films. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope became the best selling score-only soundtrack of all time.
Hans Zimmer is another very talented film composer who has composed the music for many movies including: Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, The Lion King, The Prince of Egypt, Pearl Harbor 12 Years a Slave, The Amazing Spiderman 2, Inception, A League of Their own, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Thelma & Louise. In all, Zimmer has been nominated for seven Golden Globes, seven Grammys, and seven Oscars. He has won one Oscar, for Best Original Score for The Lion King, two Golden Globes for Best Original Score for Gladiator and The Lion King, and three Grammys for The Dark Knight, Crimson Tide, and The Lion King. Zimmer’s score for The Lion King set him apart from the crowd and “cemented his position as a pre-eminent talent.”
In order to be effective, film composers must try to match mood and music perfectly, which entails finding the right combination of rhythm, pitch, melody, harmony, key, instrumentation, and so on. To come up with all of this merely out of one’s own creative mind and compose anything is amazing, and to do it well seems a remarkable talent.
Sources:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002354/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001877/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
If you want to learn more about other famous film composers, click here: http://www.imdb.com/list/ls005359850/
