I know I've posted about the TV show Once Upon A Time before, but this time I want to talk about the musical score of the show, so it'll be different and really cool, I promise.
Mark Isham is a composer and musician in Hollywood, and he's been working for over twenty nine years in the industry. He has won both Grammy and Academy Awards for his score on the film Crash in 2004, and has both written and performed music for over 100 films to date, including most recently, The Lucky One starring Zac Efron.
In addition to his film work, Mr. Isham has also composed for television shows such as Once Upon A Time. The executive producers and creators of the new ABC series, Adam Horowitz and Eddie Kitsis, were big fans of Mark Isham after hearing his work in so many films and asked him to be the composer for the show.
This past February, Mark Isham and ABC Studio released the Once Upon A Time (Music from the TV Series) EP. The soundtrack features the four main orchestral suites from the series, including the aptly named "Once Upon A Time Orchestral Suite" and "The Queen's Curse" which are two of my favorite scores used in the show.
If you haven't seen Once yet, you should definitely do that, it airs Sunday nights at 8pm on ABC! It's the best show ever and it's written by the guys who wrote for Lost, so you already know it's going to be good...
The film 'Once' received an Academy Award for Best Original Song and other awards including the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film. Later a musical was created based on this film and has been highly successful on Broadway winning eight Tony awards out of eleven nominations. Despite this acclaim, however, when my friends and I were watching this film over the summer, we were very disappointed. Even my non-television/film major friends shared my beliefs that this was a very poorly made movie and that it was hard to watch. I distinctly remember that the first five minutes of the movie was a single wide shot on the male lead playing guitar that was held for way too long and had a slow, shaky, zoom in that was NOT done on a dolly. I also noticed some continuity issues and poor location planning when I could see Spring '06 collection on all of the shop windows behind the guitarist. This was a poor decision because you can tell that they shot in 2006 yet the film takes place in an earlier time judging from the props, which include exceptionally old phones and Walkman CD players. Granted they shot on a
€ 160,000 budget, but I was expecting more from a movie that received so much praise.
'Once' had a fantastic story about a guy and a girl who find each other through music by writing, performing, and recording songs together that show their blossoming love, however, I was cringing at how the film was made. First off, the lighting was awful. It was incredibly grainy and it looked as if no professional lighting equipment was used and that they only utilized practical lighting. However, at one point I could tell they were flashing the lead actress with a cheap LED light when the actress was not directly under a streetlight while walking down the street, and this did not look good. All except maybe one or two of the shots in the entire film were handheld, which was a nice stylistic choice, but they were incredibly shaky and it was distracting. Some single shots would also last for 2-3 minutes and this production also completely disregarded the 180* rule. Despite the poor visual, at least the story and the music were entertaining. I would recommend only seeing 'Once' once.
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