Well, it’s done. The soundtracks are in the bag, or the can, or however they put it in the world of film-making – just over a week before the EIFF premiere, no less. Today was our last day of mucking about in the studio, and I can honestly say it was the most hectic day I’ve ever had while sitting down throughout…I literally lost a couple of hours out of the middle of the day, in a period of intensive coffee-crazed ProTools obsession. Time just…disappeared.

We were closeted in Studio 2 at Savalas with Michael – and his faithful and incredibly patient hound Somhairle (reference Google for spelling, it’s Gaelic for ‘Sam’) –  for about 8 hours bashing out the final mixes for the two films. Michael is the third sort of engineer/producer type we’ve been lucky enough to have tolerate us at Savalas, and his skills confirmed our suspicions that an entry qualification for working there is ‘devastating ProTools speed’. If we asked him to do something to a mix, he had either already done it or was finished by the time we were done trying to vocalise it. Which was handy, as we used every last drop of time we had, trying out different things…I suspect our seemingly limitless indecision threatened to drive Gaia quite mad as she kept us on deadline…

At times throughout the whole process, we’ve discussed with Roddy and among ourselves the peculiar dynamic we’re working with here – we’ve never really soundtracked anything before, and Roddy hasn’t been that involved with soundtrack-ers. Hey, that’s why we’re all here, I guess… However, today in particular I really got the feeling we were all pulling together and speaking the same language – there was even a strange sort of excitement when we all realised we were obsessing over the same single note at the end of one of the films. We were literally leaping out of our seats over a single plucked violin note – it may seem a bit pedantic, but in a heart-warming way. A lot of the process thus far has involved us sending sound mixes and film edits back and forth, sort of like audio/visual tennis, so it was great to knuckle down both with the locked edits and for the first time properly really together, with ourselves and Roddy. Obviously we’ve met up and so forth before, but we’ve never done a huge amount of work while in the room together, more just showing off results and taking reactions from that – more tennis. We were able to be open and honest about what we were aiming for and doing, on a point-by-point (almost note-by-note) basis, and it really showed up the collaborative side of the project. Even where we had disagreements  - no, it wasn’t all plain sailing, which I guess rarely really happens when you get five or six creative people bouncing ideas off of each other – we knew it was because we all genuinely cared a lot about the project and wanted to make the best soundtrack possibly possible, and we came to conclusions we’re all happy with.

And that’s the sort of final word, the perfect cadence at the end of our little bonus-features composer commentary here…we got a bunch of creative people together, and created something that we all like. “This is making me happy”, as Roddy would say. I think I can speak for the entire Wasabi collective when I say it’s been a tremendous experience for all of us, both as a sort of learning-curve, a creative challenge, and in terms of just being great fun. You’ll notice I’ve not said that much about the actual details of the soundtracks or indeed the films themselves – so I guess you’ll just have to come along to the Edinburgh International Film Festival next Sunday and see them for yourself…!

Phil (Fear Wasabi)