Documentary – Alastair McNamara

An energetic exploration of male identity via the lives, personalities, and adventures of a diverse band of men, real men across the globe all sharing the same name - James Bond. 2022. It is the year of 007’s sixtieth anniversary onscreen and Australian filmmaker Matthew Bauer is on a global mission to discover the lasting, contrasting and very personal impacts of sharing such an identity with James Bond.

The Other Fellow was released on Apple TV and in theatres in the US in February 2023, before releases in Sweden, Australia and the UK later in the year.

The first challenge for the music in The Other Fellow was to grapple with the iconic musical legacy of the James Bond franchise in a way which helped to tell the story of these ordinary men. I sought to blend the more traditional orchestral sounds associated with Bond which could be used to speak to the global spread of the name and the glamour of the franchise (and occasionally to poke fun at our unlikely heroes), with distorted, electrical synth textures threaded with grains of clean guitar tones to speak to the all encompassing media cloud of 007, which hangs constantly over them. The music also had the unique problem of 'fictionalising' these men's lives. This was useful to the extent that it gave the audience an insight into the characters' experience - the Bond franchise imposes its fiction onto their lives every day, however it became a problem when dealing with heavier, more serious subjects and I had to explore new, darker, more textural musical vocabularies to address the stories about race and domestic violence for example. I was also eager to embrace a thematic approach to scoring The Other Fellow, not just because the Bond films remain one of the last franchises to continue its thematic legacy, but also because the story follows many different characters across continents over a decade, and I felt this approach would help to keep these storylines distinct whilst also unifying them for the audience.

TEASE is a documentary made in extraordinary circumstances about an extraordinary website - Only Fans: a social media platform like any other, except for the fact that the content is 'adult' and customers pay for the content. In early 2020, director Jessica Brady set out to make a film following a new contributor setting up a profile on the site, but when the first COVID lockdown hit, she turned the camera on herself. She instead found out first hand how a platform like this can take over your life, when your living is made in your bedroom and OnlyFans is always calling from your pocket.

In the score, I sought to reflect the fast-paced, contemporary energy of the film, whilst slowly pulling you down the rabbit hole with Jess and plumbing darker depths towards the end of the documentary. Pulling on drum sounds from Trap music to reflect the platform in the beginning, and then darker, more ambient synth and guitar textures in the latter half, vocals were used to bridge the gap between these two sounds worlds. From Trappy vocal chops through to haunting chordal swells at the end of the film

Seabird is a Science and Natural History Documentary, which balances communicating important truths with poetic storytelling, using the human experience to say something about our planet. All the voice over in the film is taken from a single interview with Adam Nicolson, an author whose experience visiting the Shiant Isles off the coast of Scotland growing up led to a life long love for Seabirds and made him who he is today.

For Seabird’s score, I was lucky enough to have the chance to record a live orchestra at AIR studios in London. I wanted to make the most of that precious opportunity, using the full range of the Orchestra from cadenza like solos through to full orchestral tuttis, speaking to the modesty of the single puffin through to the sweeping majesty of the ocean. Follow this link to listen to the soundtrack album on Spotify.

Composer for Film, TV and Games

The Other Fellow

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TEASE

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Seabird

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