**CORRECTION** Music From The Motion Picture: Composed and Conducted by Lalo Schifrin
F/X 2 (1991) Starring Bryan Brown, Brian Dennehy
As a fan of this 1991 follow up to the original F/X film from 1986, the one thing that stuck with me for decades was the film's score. Lalo Schifrin created, in my opinion, one of the most overlooked masterpieces with this movie, which was a classic case of post-production chaos, hand-changing, last-minute edits, and all of the unfortunate fates of filmmakers and producers scrambling to put together a film while the production company, Orion, was free-falling into bankruptcy. In the midst of all of this mayhem the original Main Title sequence, the Bluey (Clown) Theme, and a few other notable cues from the film were reconstructed and amped-up a bit for the versions you heard in the theatrical release of the movie. While Lalo Schifrin did create original compositions of those themes, the composer responsible for the themes you heard in the film is Michael Boddicker. So, if you recently bought the limited release of F/X 2 Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, you'll be disappointed to find that all of Boddicker's (film) versions of those themes, are missing. These were the whole reason I bothered to pick up the soundtrack, and having waited 20 years for this score to finally get a genuine release, it was heartbreaking to only find Schifrin's versions of the main themes, which are interesting, but emotionally inferior to what Boddicker did for the film versions.
I managed to reconstruct the Main Title theme, for now, using Boddicker's film version as the foundation, and adding in Schifrin's sounds on the high and middle end, and panned appropriately, to give it a real zest and more of what you remember from the film. It was very very difficult to get this right, isolating the sound fx and dialogue from the music in the movie, as well as using frequency band pass filters to isolate instruments and beats in order to move them around the stereo space and retain faithfulness to the design of the original mixes. Wouldn't you know, both the key and the speed of Schifrin's version slightly trail the key and speed of Boddicker's, so finding the right percentage to take off of Boddicker in order to beat match to Schifrin was a daunting task using a non-linear system. I matched both beats using a 60fps timebase, exported both at matched speeds, and then did my work with the arrangement in a 30fps timebase so I could scrub discernibly. I don't have access to the proper audio mixing and editing software and hardware. I'm a video guy, so I do it all in my video editor with my ears and old fashioned techniques… Crude, yes, but gets the job done.
To be completely fair, I should note from 00:00 - 00:53 is all Schifrin's OST release version. Boddicker doesn't come in until 00:53 and is only present until 2:56 where I had no choice but to bleed him out and end with Schifrin because the music was completely drowned out by sound effects from the film. Fortunately, Schifrin's opening and ending are very similar to the film version and interesting in their own right. I don't think you'll feel as though you were cheated on anything.
I hope you enjoy this. Next, I will try to tackle the Bluey (Clown) theme, which was my favorite piece from the whole score :-)
20 июн 2015
