John's Thoughts

"The Birth of Bubble Boy" (5/14/01)

This was a synthesized rendering of what was to be the title sequence for the film animating the birth of Jimmy. I was given some storyboard sketches and a verbal explanation of the title sequence's story: We start out in a playful dream-like land. The camera begins pulling back to reveal that the dreamland we're in is really in a bubble. Soon the screen is swarming with many bubbles, each with little hints of what is going to come in the film itself. A dinosaur from Land of the Lost goes by, as well as a school of Jesus fish (his mother makes cookies shapes like Jesus fish), she's also a patriot with pictures of Ronald Reagan in her hallway - thus I made homage to this as the swarm of images builds until we enter the birth canal. We swirl down this canal and we see Bubble Boy's feet in the foreground as his theme has it's introduction with boy's choir. He's then swept into an incubator and rushed down a hallway. We see a room full of incubators. The camera pulls out further and further to reveal hundreds of them, but the incubator in the middle has a bubble around it. We then cut to his mother bringing him home. I was super inspired for this and the theme just came to me right away. It eventually became his theme in the film.

Months later the film changed concepts drastically and has become very song-driven. Surprise surprise. The opening title sequence is now about 10 seconds. But where I could find areas to keep his theme alive throughout the story (between the songs), I drew from my original theme in the demo. I would hope to record this demo live for use in the end titles, etc, but we may not have the time in the sessions. His theme is alive and well in the film, but far more fragmented than originally conceived. The score will be recorded in a few weeks and is some of the funnest material I've ever written.

In The End... (7/31/01)

My score to Bubble Boy is a strange brew indeed. The original intent was for the film to be very score-driven, launched with a colorfully poetic yet quirky title sequence laying out the birth of Bubble Boy as described above regarding the demo cue. As time went on, songs became a larger and larger part of the picture as I desperately tried to keep the film's cohesiveness intact with my theme rearing its pretty head whenever it had the chance. In the 11th hour I ended up replacing some songs with my own song-like creations, which, coming from me, sounds very unlike me; which is a good thing I guess! As the score budget shrank, so did our time to record the it. In just over two nail-biting sessions (6 hours), we put it to bed, as it were. Unfortunately there was no time to record the orchestral version of my demo for the film which was to be used as end title music and sort of my overture for the picture; it was my original demo for the film. So this actual demo kicks off the soundtrack album and also is used in the end titles of the film, which is sort of a train wreck medley of cues from the film. I also included on the album bonus tracks of a couple synth renderings of cues that eventually got replaced by songs.