ACDs Mat Bunnell & Nate Able Of agencytwofifteen Discuss The Music Of Bright Falls

Since the release of the trailer late last month, Bright Falls, which was directed by Phil Van of Little Minx, has been getting buzz all over the place. For those who aren’t aware, Bright Falls is a live action web series created by agencytwofifteen  as a prequel to the Xbox game, Alan Wake. Black Iris Music scored all six episodes and placed some existing band music that the directors just had to have. ACD’s Mat Bunnell and Nate Able, discuss their Black Iris experience.

The very eager fans of the series will be glad to know that episode 3 is out today and can be viewed at Brightfalls.com/


1.The Bright Falls series is so specific visually and does an amazing job of capturing the feeling of the game. Did you have an idea of what your music direction was initially? Or, did it evolve with the project?


MB/NA: We had a good sense of the overall tone we were looking to establish and we knew from the start that music would play a big part in that. We always find temp stuff to give rough cuts a more finished feel and provide a starting point for the music. Luckily Black Iris understood what we were going for right off the bat and we were able to run with it.


2. Did you have a musical inspiration?


MB/NA: We had a starting point in terms of inspiration with some of the wonderful stuff that was composed by Remedy for the game but we wanted to give the series a unique feel. This series is obviously drenched in David Lynch-ian touches and the guys and girls at Black Iris told us right off the bat they were huge fans of this kind of genre. So it was fun for all of us to start listing directions to dive into. You start with stuff like Ennio Morricone, Michael Andrews, Penderecki and all the Lynch bits and go from there.


3. Describe your process when it comes to musical direction.


MB/NA: We’re not musicians by any stretch, but at the point in a job when a composer or music house comes in we know the story we’re trying to tell better than anyone. At first it’s usually a question of conveying what we’re looking for in words that the composers can translate into something. Hopefully it’s a translation that makes sense when it’s played back to us and you just finesse with the composer to make sure it’s hitting all the story points at the right time and in the right way.


4. What drew you to working with Black Iris? What specifically about Black Iris made them right for the job? Had you heard of them before?


MB/NA: Our producer Joyce Chen recommended them after having worked with them before. She gave them a quick description of the project and they came back to us with a bunch of references and styles that they thought were the zone we were looking for. They were spot on and it was really obvious that they got the vibe we were trying to create. And it’s always nice when people are psyched about a project. They were psyched.


5. What was it like to work with Black Iris?


MB/NA: Great experience all around. Super talented. Super friendly. And super patient when it came to listening to us occasionally talk in circles and go back and forth on details. We could tell they were excited and super responsive and it made all of us that much more excited ourselves. We fed off each other and I think that shines through in the end result.


6. The project covers a large range of musical applications (ie. scoring to picture, background music and real band tracks). How did Black Iris help with those different directions? What’s the advantage to working with one company for all of these things?


MB/NA: The huge advantage to one company in this case was that they had such a good grasp of the series overall that, whether it was score, tracks or things verging on sound design, they were always right in line with the overall tone. By the later episodes we would sometimes get only one or two pieces of music for a section but it would be so on-point that we wouldn’t even need to hear a bunch of options. A little finessing and it was good to go.


7. How did the Best Coast track “Our Deal” end up in the series? What drew you to that track?


MB/NA: It was sent as an example of Black Iris’ real band tracks and we all loved it after one listen. It matched the overall mood for our series in such a perfect way that we immediately tried to find a spot to put it in. At one point we thought we might not be able to get it due to it not being ready for our schedule but thankfully it worked out. It was a good day when we found out it was a go.


8. Do you feel that working with Black Iris was different from working with a typical music house? Why or why not?


MB/NA: For this project in particular the combination of great composers and connections to bands paid off huge. It just doubled the resources we had to throw at the series and really helped to give it a bigger feel.


9. In your mind, what makes a project like this successful? What role does the music play?


MB/NA: Music is one of those things that when it’s done right you’re not even always aware of it. It takes the emotion of a scene or spot and amplifies it and brings it to such a fine point that the viewer can’t help but feel what we want them to feel. The best music does this without the viewer feeling manipulated or pushed there artificially. Any successes this series finds is absolutely related to music.  Audio and visual are so connected to create the mood that if the music isn’t working for us, the end result suffers catastrophically.