STEPHEN RAE CORE
Glendyn Ivin
Over the last few years composer Stephen Rae has created a whole world of music for me. We met on Beaconsfield and hit it off immediately and since then we have worked on both series of Puberty Blues and most recently Gallipoli. That's around 19 tv hours of drama! Along the way we have become good friends and it's a collaboration I value dearly. Stephen has just put up the soundtrack work for Puberty Blues and Gallipoli on Spotify. It's beautifully evocative work and it forms a huge part of the tone and the drama of those shows. To me the track Streams is the heart and soul of Gallipoli. Similar to the track Sea Hassle in Puberty Blues, once we found that track it seeped into every frame of the show. Even when it's not playing, I can still hear it. I need to do another entry of the process of working with Stephen because I love it so much. Essentially our approach is to write a large portion of the music first (as opposed to after the shoot during the edit). For both Gallipoli and Puberty Blues I had selections of music to work with during pre-production even before we had shot a single frame. I usually send Stephen photos I have taken of cast, locations and other details I find along the way. These help form a discussion about tone and from that Stephen creates long improvised pieces of music which I listen to throughout production, while in the office in pre and then constantly on set while shooting. For me, it's alot easier to see the images, if I know what they sound like first.
There is a great sequence of Stephen working on the Gallipoli 'collectors editions' behind the scenes and there is a great clip of Stephen working on the music for series 2 of Pubes HERE.
And I just found this sneaky iPhone clip I took of Stephen working on the first episode of Puberty Blues... such a great time.