The Sounds Of Sodor - Hummie Mann Interview

The year I wrote the music for Thomas and Magic Railroad was actually a very busy run. I was actually in Toronto to shoot an IMAX movie just a few months before and it was interesting that both projects were filmed in Toronto. The other thing is that The interesting thing is that several months before I also composed another film starring Pierre. The funny story about how I got Thomas is that I ended up in Los Angeles doing meetings like I usually do. He was living at the time and on an island. Outside of Seattle, what happened is I was in my office and my agent had been trying to contact the production company to try to get me an

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for the job and she was having some trouble getting through to people, so I said, I'm on my office, I'm just going to put my phone on autodialer and I'm going to keep dialing and dialing and I finally got through and when I got through to someone from a living human being, what ended up happening is they told me that director Brit Alcroft was then in Los Angeles because she didn't live in Los Angeles either;

She was in Los Angeles

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ing songwriters that day, so I said, is there any way I can go to her house and drop off some stuff? And they allowed me. I grabbed seven or eight CDs of my soundtracks and ran to Britt's house in Santa Monica and handed them to the housekeeper when I got back to my office I already had a message on my machine. That Brit wanted to meet with me so I ran back to Santa Monica and had a meeting with Britt and we sat there talking for about an hour and then I had to get on a plane back to Seattle and the next morning they hired me for the job, so it was very, uh, it was meant to be.

I mean, I was also very familiar with the material because both of my daughters had grown up watching Shining Time Station and were familiar with Thomas and all the other characters in the Shiny Time Station works. I consider bright weather to be the most welcome side of any town in our Valley. When I first got involved with Thomas' project, the film was still in its first cut and they were doing some test screenings and most of the fans of Die Hard Thomas are aware that there is It was an original script that had another character and unfortunately at one of the screenings they attracted an audience made up mostly of four and five year old children.

Who Loved loved the movie when Thomas was in front of the camera, but as soon as the live action people came out. They were alone in front of the camera, they became very restless, basically, it was recommended that they remove one of the characters and make him more Thomas and Thomason and his friends. Focused, if the diesel has unfinished business, there will surely be problems around the brick, so it was not there. I'm very happy about that, so I never got around to composing the music because the changes were made before I was writing the movie.

I had already written the themes because the songs existed, but the other character, PT Boomer, was basically eliminated, you know, proverbial lost. in The Cutting of the Floor, if there's a little problem there, yeah, Mr. Director comes and he won't let you destroy the guy, I can do whatever he wants. I'll catch him with pinches too. How come this is the now infamous screening with the four of them? years and you know, Brit was very upset because she felt like she was really making a family movie, not a kids movie, and that they took a PT Boomer.

I think they brought out PT Boomer to try to simplify this plot and also to have less humans on camera and more trains on camera, hopefully this one is just passing through you PT Boomer I'm going through that mountain. I had a great time scoring this film. In the end they allowed me to write three songs for the film. I wrote one with my lyricist Sue Ennis and two with lyricist Don Black, they became the main themes of the film. This Is Your Shining Time became the theme song for Shining Time Station and basically for the underlying story, Paint the Skies Abroad, there was a piece. called I Know How the Moon Must Feel and that became Lily's theme and then there was uh some things never leave you which became Burnett's theme it was more of a kind of solemn walls the Sparkles man one day one of His family would return but until then to protect his young brunette well, but I didn't protect you well.

He just doesn't seem to understand how magical it is, as strange as it may seem, not all of the scenes they were originally written for ended up in the movie, unfortunately, his movie ended. through some last minute changes and one of the scenes that was there was Burnett and his wife Tasha while the younger kids were dancing to the song hello, junior, junior, what are you doing up there? Come down, it's too windy, this is just fun. Basically what happens is that every time a composer starts working on a film, you watch the film and try to find the best way to translate the images into a musical statement and what he knew about Thomas and would later say if Brit actually told me this or it just came out through a conversation it wasn't to play Down to the kids, you know, even though it wasn't necessarily a children's movie, it wasn't, you know, she didn't want anyone to feel that way.

They were minimizing it, in fact, it's very interesting because one of the songs I wrote The Shining time this is your shiny time has a very challenging melody. The original idea was that there was going to be a girl, a young woman, singing that song. and Brit made the rather astute observation that the song we first appear in the movie is right after Mr. Driver speaks and therefore should be sung by a man, so now that we have the song finished, we had everything finished and "Oh, okay, now we have to find a guy who can sing in the right range and we brought in a couple of singers who couldn't actually sing the melody because it was too challenging for them.

Any Have you ever ridden a horse before? So I tried to do a lot of things where I got a lot more modern melodic content and a lot cheaper harmonic content, but it still had to be, you know, it's a fantastic world, it's Thomas and the Talking Trains. , but it couldn't be fantastic. I saved the most fantastic type of music for when they were making the transition from bright time to muffled mountain and when they were traveling along the Magic Railway along the Magic Railway, there were points where it had to be fantastic. fantastic, but I couldn't.

I could never downplay the kids and that was one of the things that impression was very adamant about, it's dark and cold and bumpy, but I'm not afraid, oh man, it's the cool truck that's missing, the cool truck . Stoke up the Magic. on the mountain that is part of Mr. Director's clue about his gold dust. This was a dream project. I had a very generous budget. I mean, I was able to hire. I think it was an orchestra of 85 or 90 musicians that many composers do today. electronic mock-ups of her entire score and Britain required her to listen to the tracks, but Brit pretty much didn't intervene and really trusted me a lot, which I really appreciated, thank you.