How the music for Tinkerbell and the Legend of the Neverbeast was made. Interview with Bleu and Brett Swain

Over the past few weeks I have been able to share interviews and parts of my trip with you. With interviews with Kevin Costner, Ginnifer Goodwin, and many many others, plus behind the scenes of the movies McFarland USA, Tinkerbell and the Legend of the Neverbeast, and Bad Hair Day, as well the TV show Fresh off the Boat. You can read over all these fun and exciting posts here.

We met with Brett Swain and Bleu for a short demonstration of how some of the amazing sounds in the film came to be. I was really cool listening to them and watching how they did that. So I am going to show you a video that I was able to record where Bleu talks about and shows us how he did it.

When we got in there he said “My name is Bleu. I produced all the songs on the film and wrote a couple of them and then worked on the sound palett for the film. And I just have to start off by saying that this is the first film I’ve ever worked on. So this whole thing has been an incredibly exciting experience for me.

As you can see there is so much that goes into and I loved seeing it all.

We were able to ask a couple of questions at the end:

Q : How do you choreograph the animation? (make the music style match the film in timing)

Bleu : Fortunately, even though we don’t have the final animation for quite a while, the timing of all the scenes is decided much earlier on in the animatic. Animatic is basically like a storyboard. It’s hand-drawn animation, kind of like one solid frame at a time. It’s like an animated storyboard. That’s how they figure out exactly what the timing of all the scenes is gonna be. But there are changes.
Brett : There are changes. And it doesn’t have to be literal. Like here’s Nix. So we’re gonna play Nix’s instrument. Okay, now we’re cutting to Gruff, and we’re gonna play his instruments. It’s just that marriage. We were talking about just momentum and rhythm and everything and those kind of things to build the tension in the scene. So we use these percussive elements to help do that. And then, over the course of the film, you’re like, wow, there’s Nix’s sound. So this must have something to do with her.

Q : How long did you have to put together the music?

Bleu   :   I worked on the film all told about a year and a half. But it was a slow process because originally I was only hired to work on one song, to produce and write the opening credit song. But then they asked me to work on another song. And then they asked me to work on the score. And then they asked me to do another song and another song and so on and so forth. So it was kind of a slow process. And it wasn’t necessarily every day until about the last eight months.
Brett   :   Yeah, and I would say the last four months in particular for the score itself. Although because Bleu was brought on so early he was probably thinking about a year out I would say, as far as the score.
Bleu   :   As soon as I knew that I was gonna be working on the score I started thinking about what that was gonna mean and developing the instruments. So I did a lot of homework type of work ahead of time to find some of these instruments and figure out how they could be played and how they could be recorded and all those sorts of things before we actually got rolling on it.