Beautifully Psychotic Scoring Chanelle Wang's Color Me Wicked
By Noah Lifschey
In a silent film, music is the bloodstream of the entire story and characters, which means every choice carries enormous weight.
Color Me Wicked is a genre-mangling modern silent romantic horror short from writer/director Chanelle Wang, and I composed the score. It’s the kind of film short that pushes art forward: irreverent and unhinged, yet classic and inviting. It doesn't copy anything else. It's the love story of two women who are serial killers, told through horror, some wry-as-hell humor, dance, wild costumes and colors. It's full of an eclectic group of characters that look like they were crosshatched between the 1940s, the 1960s, and now. I felt like I was watching a new classic when I first saw it.
There is no dialog. So the music had to be front and center. Hell, yeah.
The best work I've done happens for two reasons: the quality and originality of the film, and my relationship with the director. When there's two-way trust, you both give each other room to be yourself as artists, and that's when everything is at its best. That's a true collaboration. And it doesn't change whether it's a Cinequest selection like Color Me Wicked, or a studio film with nine producers.
Chanelle gave me two main instructions: match the wildness of the story and visuals, and be fully myself. That second one is a rare thing for most composers to hear. Directors often want a version of you, one that fits their vision, sounds like their references, or is a specific style/genre/period that the project calls for. While that’s a perfectly great way to work, Chanelle wanted me fully as an artist, like Yorgos Lanthimos wants Jerskin Fendrix, or Paul Thomas Anderson wants Jonny Greenwood.
The film opens with a slightly deranged orchestra warming up, then moves scene-by-scene through a quirky, welcoming Bach-inspired violin ensemble (played by Pierce Martin), a dirty electro-urban thump, what felt like a slightly evil mime with a wry smile beckoning us in to her twisted world, the union of two women drawn together irreversibly by the strongest and most colorful magnet possible, and more, wrapping with a warm, off-kilter brass quartet. The challenge wasn't writing so many different kinds of music, it was trusting myself to put them together under one beautifully psychotic umbrella.
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Scene 2: Group Painting
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One of my favorite cues is under a slightly-nightmarish-yet-beguiling seduction scene that needed something human as well as hard and electric.
I brought in Linying, a well-known Singapore/L.A.-based indie singer with an angelic tone that belies the music under her. I built an entirely original track around what they danced to on set. Her voice lands like a ghost with lyrics that aren't quite comprehensible, bringing in a sinewy glow I was after. It sets up what comes next: a pounding, dirty FKA Twigs-ish beat (electronic drums mixed with the organic slap of traffic lights hit with sticks and a piano body thumped with my arms), detuned modular synths and mangled cello bowing. When it lands under those visuals and that dancing, I wanted it to scare you as well as make you smile.
Scene 5: Mating Dance
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With a four-day turnaround and music needed top to bottom, I jumped happily over the cliff and swam with all the crazy things singing in my head. Even though it was our first time working together, with the trust we’d built immediately, I showed Chanelle everything I made without looking back . . . whether that meant diving into weird places with my wall of modular synths, jumping on my piano for the crooked-tilted majesty of the orchestra in the film’s open, bowing and digitally detuning an electric cello for a dark and unhinged seduction dance between two serial killers, or a low-tuned horn quartet for their gentle union painting side-by-side at the end.
I always score by intuition, not by rules. I let go, grab whatever feels right, and let the experience I have of all the aspects of a film, emotionally and physically, guide me. This score is as good an example of that process as it gets, and the music shows it.
It will be available to stream soon. Until then, the score is out everywhere: https://ffm.to/colormewicked