The Trouble with Mr Doodle

What a ride this one was! A hugely talented team and a rich world to explore, it made sense to start with the idea of providing a sonic counterpart to Sam's rich monochromatic universe.

Rhythm of course was key. But so was the materiality of his world - the paper galaxy, pens, spray cans, gas, fast oscillations between opposing states : black and white, light and shade, precision and flow. A brief already filled with dualities. Excellent!

His instruments are pens and spray cans, his scores are canvas and wall. He also writes songs - he sent me over a hundred tracks - 7 albums' worth, so our thought was, "Ok let's use these as jumping off points."

As someone for whom social media is a key part of his persona, and this was a film about him, his voice was also important. so let's use that too. I recorded Sam singing individual notes and then made a 'choir' out of them. This meant I could play 'Sam Choir' chords with extreme pitches he couldn't physically sing...let's break that boundary.

What else? The complusion - what Andrew (the editor) calls an 'irritant' is something we've used on previous projects but here it could work to enhance the creeping sense of inevitablity, to draw Sam back into his compulsion....can he resist?

I'm not a violin player by any stretch, but I find a violin a magnificently balanced marvel of engineering. It's capable of a whole range of sounds when you look at it as a sound box as well as an instrument, which I've previously explored with Cycene and Darkness + Light. What could I tease out of it this time?

Here I just wanted some atonal plucked sounds that gave a sense of the annoying insistence that a compulsion creates. High and low-pitched pitched sounds are useful as they can play without interfering with dialogue, sitting around it. Sometimes I play the irritant on a double bass so it can feel more 'pit-of-the-stomach' than 'behind-the-eyes'.

We had to make it not so annoying that it interfered with the story, but annoying enough that it fills the viewer with a sense of dread by the second half of the film.

The honky tonk piano as an instrument and the stride piano style was a feature of Sam's tracks - a monochromatic-fantastic pairing because it's percussive, black and white, and jaunty, which suits Mr Doodle's persona and his drawing style. So it became the natural home for Mr Doodle.

I extrapolated Sam's track 'World Domination' which itself had been built on a Kevin Macleod track - Amazing Plan - as a starting point to flesh out Mr Doodle's manic world, especially when the house is being gutted.

For the main theme of the film I was particularly interested in the gestures Sam makes with his pens to make the marks - how he draws - it turns out it's a very smooth meditative process, almost like choreography and waltz-like. So for this track, called 'Reverie', I use this tempo and key signature as a basis. I also realised that it feels 'close', like a visual ASMR. Texture feels present and important so this meant looking beyond traditional instruments.

Waltzes are interesting. With 3 beats in the bar, they were traditionally used as a form of dance music as they invoke movement. But they are also used to denote detachment or being lost somewhere else - 'away with the fairies'. I made 'Reverie' orchestral so it has a sense of scale and power and could slide from being a playful 'happy place' to illusions of grandeur that spiral out of control.

This was the first time I've leaned into the orchestral realm a bit more than usual. 'Reverie' is based around a semitone twist - is it major or minor? Happy or sad? Light or dark? It's both and neither. Sam's conflict is about which half of him dominates, so ambiguity about major and/or minor felt like it added a parallel dimension, and deepened the central question.

Throughout the film I've gone a bit fractal and MC Escher with it - this 'Reverie' theme pops up everywhere in different forms, registers, inversions and instruments so this question infuses most of the score throughout the film - and with the 'Sam Choir' it also moves back into the real world and makes it very specific to Sam.

As I've been increasingly exploring the world of sound design to create a sense of materiality, place and space, I recorded Sam drawing and used his gestures throughout the film as a sort of ambient bed, from long meditative drones to creating 'scratching' rhythms from his pen strokes as drums and percussion.

Andrew Stirk who also sound designed the film came up with the idea of the 'Sam babble' - a stream of consciousness that you hear as a cloud around Sam's head - like 'Pigpen' out of the Peanuts series of cartoons. He recorded Sam saying hundreds of individual words of things he might doodle, which were then layered to become the babble...denoting his 'always on' state of mind and what it might subcosciously be plotting next. You can hear it in the clip above.

I also thought radio static (white noise) had resonance like the piano as a jumble of monochromatic elements so I use it not just for a muddled state of mind but also the ambiguity of where the doodles will take Sam. Escaping air is something else that worked really well as an evolution of Sam's long drawing sounds, the deflation of an inflated world or stress.

These elements all add up to create a sound palette unique to Sam/Mr Doodle that wouldn't have the same resonance anywhere else - an approach I'm continuously refining on each project to embrace all sound sources, not just traditional tonal instruments, to create unique interconnected sound worlds for each project I work on.

It's a constantly evolving experimental journey I'm excited to see where it leads next :)