Article By: Eva Jarkiewicz

Panel: Nathan Barr (True Blood, The Last Exorcism, Shutter), Jim Dooley (Pushing Daisies, Neighbors from Hell, The Ring), Michael Giacchino (Lost, Alias), John Ottman (The Resident, The Losers, Orphan, Valkyrie, X2: X-Men United), Jeremy Zuckerman (Avatar, the Last Airbender tv show,; co-produced and performed on an album with David Lee Roth), Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman (Heroes)

Moderator: Anne Cecere, BMI executive - director of film/television relations

left to right: Chandler Poling, Nathan Barr, Lisa Coleman, Jeremy Zuckerman, John Ottman, Anne Cecere,
Michael Giacchino, Wendy Melvoin, Jim Dooley, Charley Walters
Photo by Fitz Carlile

The panel was kicked off by True Blood author Charlaine Harris, who praised composer Nathan Barr for his work on the popular TV series before turning it over to Anne Cecere. Before starting with the questions Anne played a video that highlighted some of the work of the panel of composers.

The first questions dealt with how each of the musicians got started composing for film and television. Starting with Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, known as "Wendy and Lisa", who were touring , gigging and writing music, when they were approached by Don Simpson, producer of Dangerous Minds. Don wanted to use one of their songs for the movie, but as the producers weren't satisfied with the score another composer had written they decided to have "Wendy and Lisa" do the score.

Emmy Award winning James Dooley's shared his challenge of being the first male in three generations of his family not to follow the tradition of becoming a NY city fireman. After graduating from New York University, Dooley moved to Los Angeles to study the art of film composing. He spent some time collaborating with Hans Zimmer on Gladiator. Dooley commented that the schedule can get tough, that he did Mission Impossible II with a hernia and wasn't allowed to have surgery until the movie ended. By the way Dooley's first Emmy for Best Original Music Composition for a Series, was for the ABC series "Pushing Daisies" which Dooley has been scoring all the episodes for.

Next was Acadamy Award winner Micahel Giacchino went into publicity even though he was more into filmmaking when he was growing up. Deciding that producers were the ones that hired composers, and if he were a producer he could hire himself he went to work as an assistant producer at Disney Interactive. From there he moved on to be an assistant producer at Dreamworks where he was asked to just come up with some music for a presentation that the developer needed to pitch to the director for the video game adaptation of "The Lost World: Jurassic Park". It turned out that Steven Speilberg loved the music and wanted to meet the composer. Giacchino recalled he was in the midst of working on a game he did not enjoy when he received the call from his producer to come down because Steven wanted to meet him. "Steven who?" was his initial response. Once told it was Steven Spielberg, he recalled how surreal it was, almost like a shot out of one of Spielbergs movies. He was at the top of the escalator looked down and there is Spielberg. Should he run down? Walk calmly? Let the escalator just bring him down? Finally letting the escalator just bring him down it was like the camera panning in on Spielberg. Spielberg just assumed that Giacchino would be working on the score and asked whether they would be using an orchestra to which the producers are shaking their head no to Giacchino as he responds that they would. He agreed to everything Speilberg wanted and expected.

His work on video games brought him to the attention of JJ Abrams. Giacchino described receiving an email that JJ Abrams wanted to meet with him to discuss a project. At first Giacchino thought it was one of his friends playing a practical joke on him. Fortunately he chose to respond to the email and take the meeting as this led to Giacchino providing the soundtrack for Abrams show, Alias in 2001 and later the score for Lost in which he used spare pieces of an airplane fuselage for the percussion.

Nathan Barr joked that he has worked on roughly 30 features, 26 or 27 of which he claimed none of the audience ever heard of but were very good practice for him. He stated that he did a big orchestral score for the horror film, Hostel, which Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood series, then took and put into the pilot episode. Barr told Ball that he didn't feel it was the right fit that it was too big for the show. They really loved that he shot his own music down. This in turn led to Barr composing and performing the music for the show, keeping it more low-key and organic with a cello and a guitar.

Anne then asked Barr to give some examples of the unusual and unique instrumentation that he goes out of his way to find and use. The next words out of Barr's mouth had the room laughing: "I have a human bone trumpet" It's a human femur from Tibet…they take leg bones (of some of the monks there) and turn them into trumpets and the skull caps into percussion instruments. "It's pretty gruesome but they're cool."

Jeremy Zuckerman spoke about having a very limited budget when they started doing the music for the Emmy-winning television show Avatar, the Last Airbender. Since they didn't have much money to purchase sounds they did many of the effects with mouth sounds, and now they continue doing so even though the show has done well simply because it has become one of the marks of the show.

John Ottman chimed in with the fact that he also did mouth sounds for some of the films he has worked on, Star Trek the sound of the enterprise going past, and X-Men, the X-Jet powering down.

During the brief Q&A session that followed Giacchino gave the advice to up-and-coming composers to not only love creating, but also to spend time making things with people that you can work with. Melvoin added that "a composer has to be a fan of story-telling", they should continue to see movies, read books all the while thinking about the sounds. "The gig is not just about the skills to compose."

Though Metal Life did not have an opportunity to ask a question during the all too brief Q&A , we were able to catch up with Chandler Poling from CW3PR following the panel to ask a quick question for our readers.

Metal Life Magazine: If you had one piece of advice for an unknown or up and coming band that wants to break into the industry (music for films/television or video games) what would it be?

Chandler Poling: Never say No! Don't turn down any opportunity paid or not, you never know when that broke producer could turn into the next J.J. Abrams.

Read the full Metal Life Interview with Chandler Poling HERE.

The only thing that could make the panel any better is more time. It was a fantastic group that shared some great stories and can only imagine how much more they have that none of us have yet heard.