How ‘Avatar’ Composer Jeremy Zuckerman Created The ATLA Score! 🎶 | Exclusive Interview | @TeamAvatar

[Music] the reorchestration and the re-recording of book one has been a huge project hearing these These Old themes like actually being played by an orchestra has been wild in my imagination that was how it was supposed to sound I'm Jeremy zukerman I'm the composer for avatar the Last air bender and the legend of Kora I'm putting an or Orchestra together Orchestra huh well la dah there wasn't a plan b or you know what if it's just I'm going to do music for a living I didn't know I'd be doing composition I thought I was going to be a guitarist in a rock band or something and I'm actually really happy that it didn't turn out that [Music] way so I graduated from Cal arts and right away started do doing commercials and I snuck in as a sound designer and they realized that I you know I had my masters in music composition so why not let me do music as well and so then I started doing that and I got a lot of experience um writing music like in lots of different genres and different emotions and I it really expanded my pallet and when I had the opportunity to Pivot to Avatar you know I left commercials and didn't look [Music] back so I met Ben WN who did the sound design for Avatar at cell arts and then through Ben I met Brian Kisco co-creator of Avatar of course one of the daddies of Avatar hi this is Brian kenito I remember at some point Brian reaching out to both Ben and me and saying he wanted us to do the music and sound design and he also wanted someone who wasn't like a seasoned film or TV composer to do it he wanted a different approach Nickelodeon wanted us to sort of prove ourselves which is understandable cuz we didn't really have much of a track record and so we did animat and then we did the pilot for the pilot we both did music and we both did sound Z together and then we had to separate duties after [Music] that this is the Proto annai but it's sounds like chipmunk version remember staying up all night finishing this pilot and then then coming home completely Delirious it was like 10:00 a.m. by the time we finished we' gone all night it seemed so hard we were just figuring it all out as we went we would work at Brian and Ben's house in sort of this weird little Nook that had like two computers and like keyboard and some random instruments but we were working on a Melody it was like the French horn main theme and Brian said that's it from the other room we're like oh okay all right he just shouted from the other the room that that was it you know he he heard it and he knew that that was that was the main theme yeah this ought to get everybody moving the Avatar instrumental pette took a while to sort of take shape and it started with a bit more of a sort of quirky DIY kind of approach where I started realizing that Avatar wanted more it wanted a bit more epic sort of orchestral sound in addition to those unique tambers of you know these sort of non-western instruments so I started sifting through these libraries and these libraries were really primitive at the time these midi libraries so midi sends information tells the computer what note you know how long how loud and midi is uh really powerful in that you can make orchestral music with midi for very cheap but it also is sort of problematic in that it doesn't sound like a real orchestra that is correct Master Arrowhead I had my pallette which was orchestral instruments like Woodwinds brass strings percussion and then I also had my weird collection of instruments that I would record myself playing and then sort of edit and make it sound halfway decent and plug it in a lot of the performances were pretty spontaneous and we're we're pretty much take one so there's definitely like warts and things in some of those performances but I think that it sort of like lended itself to the aesthetic of the show and sort of the Innocence you know of the characters I think that the blue Spirit stuff that for me was was sort of a big moment I was discovering the dudic at the same time and I really loved playing it it was just like it's just such a wild sounding instrument it's so expressive it's the slightest little sort of articulations in your mouth can make a huge differences sonically and so it was really fun to play that and start to develop that theme so the blue spirit I wonder who could be behind that mask one of the things I really loved about Avatar was that they wasn't afraid to get really heavy really serious really emotional sad dark but it always served a purpose and it always served the story and the characters and I never worried about going too dark there might have been a comment like early like maybe in the first episode from someone that it was a little sad or something and I think we all just ignored it I think Brian might have mentioned it said don't worry about it he's like I heard this but it's fine proceed and in fact it got much sadder and darker and heavier and we never dumbed down the emotions and we we would talk about that kids are emotional beings just like adults they just don't have the language sometimes I just always did what I felt was right for the scene sometimes that was super goofy trombone poopy pants cues do they have bathrooms in the spirit world as a matter of fact they do not and sometimes it was really like dark almost Sonic art stuff like the co music which if you listen back it's pretty abstract stuff and it's pretty creepy and that was like creating clusters with aello and doing microtonal stuff microtonal means if you look at our piano you see that we have you know the same pattern of 12 notes over and over but there's all kinds of frequencies in between each key so there's all kinds of like microtonal stuff and Co and weird tambal sliding and scraping on the bow and different extended techniques and stuff and I was also at that time I was studying scores of 20th century composers like Pendery and zanakis and um takamitsu and composers like that and I was totally inspired by those guys and wanted to figure out how to bring some of that vocabulary into this a little bit I'm must be going now we'll meet again this is called the good Jen it's a Chinese zither so I was really motivated to get decent on it because I wanted to be able to play on it just knowing that people are going to be hearing me and if I sounded terrible uh you know I had no one to blame but myself so this is winter spring summer and fall sung by iro Mako was the actual voice actor and it was a really beautiful performance he did Four Seasons Four loves Four Seasons for love dealing with the the four cultures was so interesting cuz this wasn't necessarily Earth and so these cultures weren't any real specific culture that existed you know in reality and I think that was really good because it can get really problematic if you have like evil guys be a certain culture and that was something we were very conscious about from this moment on I will be known as the Phoenix King making a dudok be a bad guy's instrument for instance the duduk was Zuko's instrument but it was Zuko when he was evolving and having an emotional Journey had nothing to do with him in his sort of negative State and so those kinds of of instruments that I used when I was dealing with that were a lot more sort of generic and vague like brass and that was more speaking to the tropes of film and TV music where we have big heavy mesque brass and that represents like bad guys and and it makes sense cuz it's weighty so it works for the Fire Nation but we also tweaked it a little bit Ben had this uh piece of equipment was even tied like high-end sort of Reverb box and had this incredibly like dramatic 60-second Reverb so we would run the brass through that I just ran like one long note through it and then I sort of played it so sometimes that would double with the brass and it gave it this sort of Otherworldly sound it gave it something a little extra a little sort of psychological for the end credits that was based on Indonesian monkey chat and you get CH Chu ch ch Chu that kind of thing and then you like overlay it and offset it you get these like crazy phasing things and very much much inspired by [Music] that so this is a pipa Chinese loot um I used it on winter spring summer and fall all the Chong band stuff songs from uh C two lovers happy to go wherever the wind takes us Koshi a lot of times just that open Koshi Warrior stuff [Music] I don't think I ever hired anyone until the last four episodes which was aired as one 2hour event and that's when we hired a um sort of mediumsized string Ensemble I think it was 16 players I wasn't working with Hong Wang yet who as I mentioned is the Chinese multi- instrumentalist he's fantastic and I think I worked with him for about a year before I started Kora which was great cuz I learned a lot in that amount of time and I continued to learn from him so he slowly started to introduce me to more things and then I start to write for him and then he would sort of be like well you know that's a little high for this instrument it's better in this range and so over the course of the four years I worked with him I really started to hone in on how to write for these things these beautiful instruments and how to sort of write more idiomatically for them and give him space too like I would write very sort of simple parts that maybe had little it's called Grace notes or that are sort of embellishments yeah all the sort of um lead instruments are often hung and sometimes we' have AR playing Unison with the strings or the violins and I think that gave it a really unique [Music] sound Naga go that a girl go go go [Music] I think Avatar and core are probably the hardest things I've ever worked on everyone was sort of at their aame you can't ever phone anything in even the smallest little transitions equal amount of care went into those moments as the huge epic important season finale moments you know the reorchestration and the re-recording of book one has been huge project it's been over a year that we've been working on it and I have to thank my assistant on this project Brian Harold has been a huge help he was an avatar fan so he was pretty motivated well actually what we did first was we separately watched the whole series again and took notes on like our favorite musical moments and also moments that felt really important narratively and felt important to the fans and we went through that and we sort of picked out our favorite stuff and we made a crazy Dock and figured out the durations and then we had to cut a bunch of stuff out and then once we honed in on what we wanted Brian rebuilt all the old sessions some of them were 18 years old most of them actually and then once we sort of had all our music and the track list Brian made charts for the musicians so he made the scores and then we recorded strings in Budapest and then we recorded brass in LA and we hired a soloist Josh plotner to do all the woodwinds and then I went ahead and I fixed up some percussion because a lot of the percussion was really sort of dated sounding and at the time you get this thing called the machine gun effect it's the same sample over and over again and now libraries have gotten more sophisticated and they they sort of randomize or go through in a sequence like different sort of samples of the same instrument and I kept a lot of the other sounds and the old performances I kept those I didn't want to lose some of the magic of the original but the elements that I felt didn't have much character just sounded sort of cheap or old I replaced but the big thing was recording musicians that was huge ladies and gentlemen the flameo hearing these These Old themes like actually being played by an orchestra has been wild because in my imagination that was how it was supposed to sound that's what I was trying to evoke so the the session with Budapest to record the strings started 5: in the morning CU it's remote so at 5: in the morning they start right with the premier main title theme and that was wild hearing that with a full string section that was so cool it was just like here we are and it was it's just thinking that it's about 18 years later it's just so strange but so wonderful these remote recording sessions they really got it dialed in and so you talk to the contractor over zoom and then use this other software to listen in real time and so you give notes between tags and there's a doctor too we made it work and it's really special I think it sounds really special I think it really worked I think it's going to be pretty exciting for people I hope Where Have You Been Prince Zuko you missed music night the Ang becomes ocean track sounds pretty incredible with real players some of the Epic stuff you know there's another one the northern water tribe that's the one where they show up for the first time in the northern water tribe and and Saka SE UA and that whole thing that sounds really great some of the more intimate stuff though too all of it pretty transformed it was one of those things where like it's like when you paint a house and you paint the shutters and then you're like I'm paint everything so we we started out we were like all right we'll just do like a few cues you know and then we did like every everything on the [Music] album [Music] [Applause] [Music] a [Applause] [Music] when I started Avatar I I was sort of trying to get it right you know and I had no idea that it would have the legs it's had and the impact it's had this kid who he wanted to come out to his parents and he was really scared and he listened to like something from Kora the greatest change he said it fired him up like it helped him have the courage to come out to his parents when we hit our lowest point we are open to the greatest change and then he talked to him and it was great and it went great and it was such a happy ending and like stuff like that or people who have talked about like the show like helping them like they're depressed and it's really helped them you know get through really dark periods and that just like sort of blew me away but backing up a little bit it probably the first year Avatar was out and Brian and Mike went to Comic-Con and it came back and they told me people were asking about the music and it just felt like it was serving a purpose and it was functional and it was meant to just support it never occurred to me that people would actually be interested in hearing the music on its own so that was like Wow people are listening that's crazy so that was pretty amazing and now here we are all these years later and like we see people with like AA hats just seeing Avatar and chorus showing up in culture at unexpected times and random ways and it's it's really satisfying let's do it let's go on a vacation just the two two of us anywhere you want really okay I've always wanted to see what the spirit world's like sounds perfect so the Kora assami moment that I did not know anything about until right before I started working on that episode we were doing what's called a spotting session which we do for every episode where we would go through a scene by scene Moment by moment and talk about what needs to happen so that blew me away I was so excited I was like freaking out oh man I was just going nuts I like couldn't sleep for like a couple days it just felt so important and meaningful and bold I was excited that they were like doing that cuz this was what 2014 or something which things have opened up a lot you know they still have ways to go but they've opened up a lot in that amount of time it feels really good because it's such a positive story I feel like it's a a good thing to have in the world [Applause] it's really nice being a part of this this thing that's really seemed to have a real impact on people it's just strange I didn't expect it I got lucky you know I was there at the right time and around the right people and the ethos has always been you know making art with your friends and I guess that energy out in the world has some [Music] purpose [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Avatar: The Last Airbender

Views: 204,276

Keywords: nickelodeon, animation, anime, avatar, avatar the last airbender, atla, avatar on netflix, netflix, the last airbender, aang, toph, team avatar, avatar studios, zuko, toph beifong, full episode, full episodes, live action, netflix avatar, avatar the last airbender netflix, netflix avatar the last airbender, avatar netflix, avatar netflix trailer, avatar netflix clip, avatar netflix live action, avatar netflix cast, daniel dae kim, katara, azula, Gordon Cormier, Ian Ousley, animated

Id: 1b28nDdW-cw

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023