‘Toorbos’

This award winning local film based tells the story of the uprooting of a young forest woman and her community during the time of the last forest inhabitants of the Knysna forest. – Directed by Rene Van Rooyen

THE ASK

We had to create a seriously ‘organic’ score for this film. You needed to feel the forest breathe and the struggles in the music. We also had to establish the Afrikaner identity. There needed to be a distinct theme for the main character and a clear separation in the themes for the forest and town.

The Response

We recorded a whole bunch of live instruments for this. Some we purposefully played incorrectly or more irregularly to get a rugged/raw/authentic sound out of them. We used the concertina and accordion for the Afrikaner identity and for the breath of the forest by experiment with recording the air leaving these instruments and processing them in unconventional ways. The viola was mainly used for the main character and piano was only introduced in for the town (and represented the separation between forest and town). After a lot of trial and error, we ended up removing a lot of elements from the score, so that the focus can be more on the organic live instruments. Even in the mixing stage we scaled back to make the overall sound more rugged to enhance the emotional depth of the film.

The word

Client

The Film Factory

Awards

SAFTA Golden Horn 2021:
Best Achievement in Original Music/Score – Feature Film
Best Achievement in Script Writing

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DELIVERED ON

Original Music Composition
Music Supervision

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