As soundtrack work came to be his staple, he moved to the US in 2010, where he worked on movies like Kick-Ass (2010), Sucker Punch (2011) and George Lucas’s animated fairytale musical Strange Magic (2014). De Vries’ first foray into movie soundtracks came with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), and he later went on to become music director of the same filmmaker’s Moulin Rouge (2001). In the early 1990s he became renowned as a programmer and producer, and he has since worked with the likes of Björk, Annie Lennox, David Bowie, U2, Madonna, Robbie Robertson, Rufus Wainwright and countless others. Originally from London, de Vries actually enjoyed a brief spell in the 1980s writing for Sound On Sound, and also played keyboards in the Blow Monkeys. Add the many on-set recordings, Damien’s tendency to shoot in long, unbroken takes, and the complexity of much of the orchestration, and it meant that the music tech involved was extreme.” From The Topĭe Vries is talking from his Berry Drive studio, in the Arts District of downtown LA. The tiniest vibraphone note that was played too soft or too hard, or with the wrong mallet, had the potential to bring the whole thing down. ![]() Nick hardly slept for the last six months! Damien has such an eye and ear for detail. “The recording and mixing sessions were among the most intense and complex I have ever done,” recalls de Vries. Executive music producer Marius de Vries and music engineer and mixer Nicholai Baxter faced many challenges during the movie’s two-year gestation, and there were times when recording, post and mix sessions required extreme working schedules of 16 hours a day, with some DAW sessions ballooning to Pro Tools' maximum of 768 voices. In the quest for authenticity and emotional honesty, the on-screen musicians and actors had to look and sound 100 percent convincing, and one obvious but technically complicated way of achieving that was to record as much of the singing live on set as possible. The narrative and visualisations move gradually from the primary-coloured and idealised to the gritty and realistic, resulting in an emotionally affecting ending that does not conform to the Hollywood feel-good stereotype.Ī major factor in the movie’s strong emotional impact is that the jazz-flavoured soundtrack favours the gritty and realistic over Hollywood schmaltz and smoothness. Both the visuals and the music are to a significant degree a homage not only to Hollywood musicals from the ’40s and ’50s, but to the romanticism of the French New Wave musicals of Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand. La La Land traces the fortunes and misfortunes of jazz pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone), as they try to balance the pursuit of their professional dreams with the needs of their romantic relationship. The virtuoso opening scene, in which hundreds of dancers and singers strut their stuff in a huge traffic jam on a sun-drenched LA freeway overpass, accompanied by an infectious Latin jazz track, has already become iconic. Sales of the soundtrack album have also snowballed, taking it to the top of the UK album chart and to number two in the US. The brainchild of director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz, the musical has, at the time of writing, won a record-breaking seven Golden Globe Awards and garnered a record-equalling 14 Academy Award nominations. Unless you have spent the last few months lost in the jungle, you will know that La La Land has become the biggest movie in a very long time. Photo: Dale RobinetteĪchieving a naturalistic sound on a Hollywood film set isn’t easy - but was central to director Damien Chazelle’s vision for La La Land.
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The problem for developers may be clear, but how do the new Apple developer terms affect customers? Forget for a moment that more time and energy in development probably means higher prices for some software. Some are already, and others are considering pulling their products off the iPhone. Although many developers want to sell their software to iPhone and iPad users, eventually many may give up. Any time you tell developers how they should work, you limit technical and business choices that might be valid and useful. Gruber does go on to say that there's no change for iPhone developers, and I'd disagree with that. I'm just arguing that it makes sense from Apple's perspective - and it was Apple's decision to make. I'm not arguing (up to this point) that it benefits anyone other than Apple itself. I'm not arguing that it's anything other than ruthless competitiveness. ![]() So from Apple's perspective, changing the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement to prohibit the use of things like Flash CS5 and MonoTouch to create iPhone apps makes complete sense. Straightforward enough, and I largely agree with Gruber's analysis, though you have to wonder whether Jobs also noticed this: That's the sort of situation that creates a license to print money.Īpple doesn't want another platform that could become the standard and keep Apple from locking in developers and the customers that come with them. At a certain point developers wrote apps for Windows because so many users were on Windows and users bought Windows PCs because all the software was being written for Windows. But the point of the post was that Apple wanted to lock developers into the iPhone OS platform and turn the app store into a de facto platform: Jobs said that Apple thought that Gruber was insightful and didn't see what he wrote as negative. Tao Effect blogger and software developer Greg Slepak posted that he emailed Jobs about the term changes and that Apple's CEO responded, pointing to John Gruber's post about the situation. Are app developers truly independent businesses, or would tax codes let the IRS classify them as employees? If some class action lawyers don't have a field day with this, I could see the IRS having some fun. Through the terms, Apple becomes a quasi-employer that controls how app developers do their work and, effectively, makes it more difficult for them to create and sell software for multiple handsets. That action is beyond setting technical specifications. |
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