In case you didn’t know, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Filmology and Screenwriting, which I got from the Bucharest “I.L. Caragiale” National University of Cinema and Theatre Arts (sounds really pompous, I know). It was in the middle of the process of acquiring it that I realized that writing film isn’t the thing for me, especially in the context of a budding Romanian film industry.
However, one of the many good things that came of this was the meeting of incredible (then-student) Malay director Ismail Jamaludin, who became a close friend of mine during the struggle to finish school. We even had a few tries at writing some short films together, but the results always ended up getting censored and shelved by our supervising tutors.
It was also during this time that I started experimenting with scoring films, and my experience with this grew slowly over the years. I ended up moving to the UK for an MA in Music Production and Ismail went to Kuala Lumpur to wreak havoc among Malay production companies and television execs, something he’s still in the process of doing.
When he contacted me in August about the possibility that he might ask me to score a Playground Productions film for Malaysian TV9, I din’t think twice about accepting. The movie’s a romantic comedy and it’s called “Aku, Dia & Tong Sampah” (“Me, Him & a Trash Bin” in Malay).
I finally got the specs for the tracks somewhere in September, and I scored the whole film over two weekends, one for the draft tracks, and the other for their final versions.Liyana Fizi had already done the theme song for the movie (she also has a cameo somewhere at the end) and there were two piano variation tracks based on it, so my job was to expand on those into other musical genres, as well as typical cinematic music, and help set the playful rom-com mood of the film. From the multitude of samples, tracks and variations that I made during my time working on the score, 7 of my tracks ended up being used in the actual movie.
Ismail also greenlighted my remastering them and making an OST album for “Aku, Dia & Tong Sampah” freely available from my Soundcloud. It contains 8 tracks: 7 of mine, and a piano instrumental based on Liyana Fizis “Jatuh”, performed by Ayop Azril. Enjoy.
[...] I had the job of scoring a romantic comedy for Malaysia TV9 a few weeks ago, and I ended up creating a huge number of draft tracks and variations for the guys over there to use, some better than others. I didn’t even have a chance to see the scenes I was about to score, you see, and I did my work based on a script, instructions from the director and a 30-second trailer alone. The movie was shot in 6 days and scored over the course of 2 weekends, so you can imagine the rush. [...]