"Grim" genre: Film Music
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	Creepy and suspenseful. Score from a three-minute suspense/thriller short film. Inspired, in part, by James Newton Howard's "The Sixth Sense."
	Story Behind the Song Grim is a three-minute "scary movie" directed by Doug Conant which was entered in Good Morning America's Scary Movie contest, in October of 2000. It centers around a young woman who comes home from a party and is stalked by some kind of ghostly apparition. (Incidentally, I played the ghostly apparition.) It was shot and scored on a VERY tight schedule; we only had about 4 nights in which to shoot the film, and I had 3 days to score it. Considering the time constraints, I am quite pleased with the result. The movie was supposed to be scarier than it turned out to be -- some of the most suspenseful moments were impossible to achieve in such an abbreviated production schedule. As a result, the movie actually turned out to be more slow than scary. Unfortunately, this in turn caused the music to turn out slow at times, because there weren't that many tense moments to play with. It also came out somewhat repetitive, I must admit, due to my tight deadline. But there are still a few shining moments in here. My personal favorite section of both the film and the score is the last 30 seconds, in which the main character gets into bed and is trying to go to sleep when she is suddenly startled awake by the untimely buzzing of the alarm clock. She leans over and turns it off, and when she turns back to face the ceiling, the ghostly apparition is hovering over the bed. She screams, he goes for her throat, cut to black. The end. The movie has no dialogue and very few sound effects, so most of the time the music is the only audio accompaniment. I composed the piece entirely in Cakewalk Pro Audio 8, and recorded the final mix in a single pass with my Sound Blaster Live Platinum. It is entirely synthesized. I used various public domain SoundFont patches for the instrumentatation. I was most impressed with the quality of the oboe, which is why you'll hear it used so much in the piece.

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