Summer 2024 Coda

new short film release & my techniques on avoiding "creative block"

Hey ya’ll. Hope everyone’s having a great summer. Here’s a couple things as the summer winds down:

New DiNola Score Alert!

A short film I scored came out since my last post! You can check it out below, though since it’s the finale of a 3-part series, I recommend you watch Episodes 1 and 2 before this one.

I had a super fulfilling time scoring this under the direction of my long time great friend, Writer/Director Ethan Romaine. Ethan and I both grew up in a rural area of Appalachian Maryland called Allegany County. All of the films take place (and were filmed) there, so there’s an extra personal element to coming on for this project.

For the film’s music, Ethan and I tried to explore what could be done blending score and source music. Part of this was for budgetary reasons, as soundtracking the movie with famous rap songs from our high school years would have been costly. But another part of this was experimental: could we score a movie with trap beats?

What are source and score music? Score is the music you think of as the soundtrack for the movie. Those pieces of music play underneath the story, amplifying the emotions of the scenes and guiding the audience. It’s not necessarily in the world of the movie, because that’s what source music is. Source is music that the characters themselves hear. Think: whatever is playing on the radio.

What resulted is, I think, a unique blend of trap beats (the kind of music that might be playing on car radios at a teenage tailgate) and more traditional score. If you watch, please let me know what you think!

I’ll be releasing some more content related to the film in the coming weeks, including an official album, so keep your eyes/ears peeled!

What To Do If You Have Creative Block

Also — I just finished a new album under my indie rock moniker Sure! If you didn’t know about that, check out my last album under that name:

As I’m finishing up this new album and sending those songs I’ve been working on off to get mixed, it has me thinking: time to start the next album… And I’ve had a bit of writers block in that sense, in finding what the new album will look, sound, and feel like, so I’d like to speak about some things that are helping me through, because I don’t really believe in “writers block” anyway, even if I’m using the term.

I think, generally, there are just different seasons where our artistic productivity can look different. Maybe there’s a time when we’re pretty speedy at getting lyrics out, maybe another time when we are brainstorming, letting things stew on what we envision the creative work will look like, etc. And that being said, here are some things I find helpful in stimulating the creative process, whatever that may look like:

Take a walk

When you need to clear your head, taking a walk is always a good idea. A lot of times, I feel what is “writer’s block” is really just “distractions.” If the creative act is a lot like channeling, than I think removing distractions and focusing, similar to meditation, allows ideas to come, fall in love with certain ideas, which in turn give us the energy to bring them to fruition.

In many zen practices, there’s a type of walking meditation called Kinhin. I highly suggest it, since it’s an even more focused version of a normal walk. But if you need a more scientific reason, in this study, walking increased participants creativity by 81%.

There’s also this very cool book on the subject my friend recommended me, which I haven’t yet read, but looks fantastic.

I always loved what David Lynch had to say about ideas. In this great video, he talks about how he “has lost three great ideas in his lifetime” and how important it is to allow some of the millions and millions of ideas that exist into the conscious mind.

I think Lynch’s attitude about how ideas are already there, it’s just a matter of catching them, is extremely optimistic, and makes the idea of writer’s block seem less scary, since all of the ideas are already out there, you just have to find them.

So take a walk and see if that helps you catch some ideas.

Write on a different instrument

Specifically for scoring films, which usually has a time constraint, catching ideas and getting inspired needs to be sped up. I find switching instruments (for me usually from guitar to piano, and vice-versa) is super beneficial in generating new ideas.

If you don’t play multiple instruments, try singing as opposed to playing the instrument. Or try using the essentially unlimited synth patches that exist via plug-ins on the various Digital Audio Workstations like Logic, Ableton, etc.

Even switching mediums can be helpful. Sometimes I write on this Substack when I’m feeling stuck on the musical generation end, which in turn gets me excited to get back to doing music once I’ve had enough of this.

Set ghost-parameters

On my last post, I spoke to Will Wiesenfeld from Baths about ghost-parameters. With the multiple monikers he releases music as, and all of them being solo projects, he finds that creating with self-imposed rules in mind can be super helpful. Here’s what he had to say:

Especially if you are a solo artist or a producer, you are free to do whatever you want, right? Like philosophically, that's the whole thing, you have the world at your fingertips, you can include any idea that you can think of. So there's a massive amount of choice paralysis with that. Because you can do anything, sometimes it's difficult to even get started or to know where you want to take something.

So the fun incidental practice of establishing these ghost rules for something you're working on helps to guide the process initially. It doesn't mean you absolutely, bottom-line have to stick to them, but it's a great way to get things kicked off.

I couldn’t agree more.

It reminded me of a story behind one of the most iconic movie scores of all time: Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho. Partly due to budget restraints, Hitchcock made Pyscho on the cheap and in black and white (even though color film was most definitely available at the time). Responding to this, Herrmann set his own ghost parameter, making a “black and white score” for Hitchcock’s black and white movie. In his mind, that was scoring the movie with ONLY strings. What resulted was ringing the strings dry of all of their sonic capabilities, even to their breaking point: by playing the highest note violins can play, in a percussive, repetitive manner:

This is why they are called ghost parameters, because of the horror element.

Just kidding, I made that up.

Consume other art

Note: I said consume other art… not media. Because we don’t need more distractions away from the ideas. Social media is rarely inspiring, it’s usually distracting.

What you consume should be super intentional here, and that’s why I leave it last, because I do think it’s extremely important, but it should be a rarer resort.

Other art can spur our own ideas, can get us more open to catching ideas, it can give us techniques and context with which to draw on. It is important. But don’t let it turn into a distraction by going on for too long.

Hopefully this little post was enough of a distraction — now get creating!