Amazon Prime's Lord Of The Rings Demo
/My thoughts on 2020 ahead and a video. Many things to reflect on both amazing and sad. Especially the death of my mom just one month ago. But one 2019 demo project in particular that I am very proud of despite the obvious hurdles it involved I will share below.
****Demo submitted for Amazon Prime's Lord Of the Rings TV show.****
Months ago in mid 2019, I recorded and submitted this demo suite of themes and score music to friends & colleagues of mine who are the showrunners for Amazon's Lord Of The Rings series to be considered to be their composer for the show. I knew the political stakes were/are high for the "composer hire" on a show of this budget and stature and I am very grateful and blessed for the opportunity that my music was able to be submitted and listened to by the showrunners. I received a very nice and encouraging letter from one of the showrunners that reiterated that sometimes it is the projects that we do not get that prove to be more important in advancing our careers forward in the long run. I could not agree more and this is ultimately why I am choosing to publicly share my music with the world.
So while I now know that I will not be the composer on the show, and I debated myself over the last few months about whether I would even make the music I wrote for them public, I ultimately decided that I was proud enough and honored to have worked with the amazing AFM Local 47 musicians in Los Angeles on this demo, I felt it should be out there in the world and not lost to the trunk of unused demos.
The team I assembled to produce this demo package was the best of the best in Hollywood. Many thanks to Noah Gladstone, Adam Michalak and the team at Hollywood Scoring, my dear colleague Lisa K. Fowle (not on facebook) for her wonderful mix, my orchestrator and teammate Ryan Humphrey. Landon Donoho for the wonderful imagery and video edit. And of course all the amazing Local 47 players in the orchestra, including concert master Mark Robertson, soloists Phil O'Connor, Dylan Skye Hart, Rob Schaer, Chris Bleth and LA Master Chorale soprano vocalist Karen Hogle Brown.
Instead of releasing it here as a retrospective to my work in 2019, I felt it should instead be released on January 1, 2020, symbolic of the beginning of a new chapter and outlook going forward this year in hopes that I will manifest something out of this score demo suite. Ultimately now...I own and control all of the music, themes, arrangements and orchestrations performed in this video and if the right project comes along...(oh say....maybe an other-worldly epic fantasy adventure with dragons and swords)...it could be theirs for their show. But till then...please enjoy!
P.S. There is also a Reelcrafter page where audio from the entire suite can be downloaded here: https://rcrft.co/reel/BrianRalston/LOTRSuite
