Is it a struggle to share the soundscape of a film with sound effects?
Not really. Rather than struggle with the sound effects people, we exchange ideas. As a composer you’d be a fool to think that you’re providing the only strand of audio that is going to be on the final dub of the movie. Quite often we might be just one part of a tapestry of sound. Certainly that was so in Kingdom of Heaven, and also in Narnia, especially in the battle sequence, which is very intense. The music is just one layer of sound that you hear. You wrote great scores for both Shrek films. What kind of challenge did those present? It is very different writing music for animation in many ways. Remember that the sound – not just the music, but the soundtrack – has to be built up from nothing. In a live action film movie, any given scene would have sound effects, what we call Foley, such as footsteps, and there would be the natural ambience noise. In an animation, there is none of that. Everything has to be provided. Similarly, you have to provide music for all the emotions. For the
