Leica: Like the Night [audio]

Credits & Description:

Title of Entry: Like the Night
Brand: Leica
Product/Service: SL Camera and M Lenses
Client: Jason Heward
Entrant Company: Anné Kulonen
Creative Agency: Direct to Client
Duration of Entry: 02:16
Craft Leader(s): Anné Kulonen
Production Company: Paddington Pictures Ltd
Date of Release: 2019-10-17
Director: Barney Cokeliss
DOP: Barney Cokeliss and Philippe Kress
Notes: What is the essence of night? Enigmatic and intoxicating, filled with danger yet dangerously addictive, it’s dark and dirty but beautiful and full of light at the same time. It is the juxtaposition of these qualities that I tried to embrace with my score for ‘Like the Night’ for Leica cameras.
I was asked by the director to create a score for this film that would complement and enhance the powerful night-time journey as seen through the female photographers’ lenses.
The director knew very early on that he wanted to set the film to Byron’s classic poem ‘She Walks in Beauty’, which naturally provided me with a clear starting point from where to begin exploring and expanding the audio world of the piece.
Finding the right tonality and pace for the voice recording was crucial for the project and the score as a whole. There were discussions about using a few different voices, but the director had a very clear idea of the tone he was after (non-expressive, non-declamatory) and we quickly settled on using one of my first voice recordings that had the right vocal delivery and rhythm to start building upon.
The film was shot over many months in different parts of the globe and when I initially started working on the project, I only had Byron’s words, a few wonderfully atmospheric stills and the director’s brief on the mood to work from.
The brief was very open, expressing with few words the mood he wanted to create with the film and generally telling me to follow my instincts and just “run with it”. As a composer, it’s a great privilege in this industry to be given so much freedom, so it was enormously exciting for me, yet also quite daunting, to attempt this task to do justice to this stunning visual journey and the director’s vision, not to mention the classic poem.
The film is a gradually expanding global journey through the eyes of female photographers, giving the viewer a glimpse of all the different shades of the night; the dirt and the beauty, the dissonance and the harmony, the noise as well as the serenity, and I wanted the score to reflect this great spectrum. I have a background in sonic arts and experimental sound as well as a more traditional classical training, so I really wanted to do something very contemporary and modern to support the visuals, while still creating a piece with a strong emotional core and musicality. A mix of acoustic and electronic, harsh and smooth, a melting pot of different flavours. A piece that is simultaneously choppy and distorted, but still with beauty and emotional charge, something intriguing where you don’t quite know what’s coming at you from around the corner.
Editing Company: Stitch
Editor: Ben Corfield
Sound Studio: Jungle Studios
Sound Engineer: Ben Leeves
VFX Company: Glassworks VFX
Post Production Company: Time-Based Arts
Voiceover: Anné Kulonen, 'She Walks in Beauty' by Byron
Post Production Operators / Artists: Duncan Malcolm and Matthew Fletcher @ Glassworks VFX
Post Production Operators / Artists: Simone Grattarola and Myles Bevan @ Time Based Arts