"The Knight and the Assassin" genre: Film Music
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	Punchy and action-packed. Score for an action short film, in the style of John Powell's "Face/Off".
	Credits: Composed and orchestrated by George Dean; percussion composed by Doug Conant
	Story Behind the Song The Knight and the Assassin is a three-minute home-brew sci-fi action flick directed by Doug Conant and produced by Doug Boemker. It's technically a Star Wars fan film, but it has almost no story, and no connection to the established characters or settings. The film begins with the requisite scrolling opening text over the starfield, which in a real Star Wars film would be scored by the famous John Williams fanfare, but in this case it's just a french horn theme with a rock beat and a bass guitar groove. Suspenseful music ensues as we reveal a city street, with a young man dressed in all black being stalked by another young man wearing sunglasses. A french horn marks a brief shot of a lightsaber hanging from the black-clad lad's belt: he's a Jedi Knight. Tension builds as the sunglass-wearing pursuer pulls a blaster: he's the assassin. The assassin fires, the Jedi whips out his lightsaber and blocks it; the assassin drops and rolls to avoid the reflected blaster bolt, fires again, and the Jedi blocks again. Now they really get into it, with the assassin firing madly and the Jedi blocking every shot as we transition into a fast action cue, building as the two approach each other until finally the Jedi whips around and stabs the assassin with the tib of his saber. The music goes into a small "Psycho" tribute as we see several angles of the assassin's climactic demise, and the french horn returns to mark the his slow tumble to the ground. Then we hear the return of the opening theme, this time played by trumpets, as the Jedi walks away triumphant. The End. The action cue and opening groove are then reprised, modified, for the closing credits. I wrote this over the course of about three weeks during the summer of 1999. The film was originally intended to be an experiment, an excuse to try our hand at rotoscoped special effects like lightsabers and blaster bolts. We soon heard about a digital video contest that was coming up and we decided to try to finish the film in time to enter. (The special effects proved too time consuming and we didn't finish in time.) Since the Star Wars music is copyrighted, we needed to use original music for the score if we were to enter it in a contest. So, since I had done a number of MIDI orchestrations of various themes, and had recently composed a short original piece, I volunteered to compose the score. The music was basically complete by the end of the week, but the percussion and some of the finishing touches were not added until after the deadline had already passed. The film has no dialogue; originally we intended to add sound effects to the film, but this was never done; so the film's only audio accompaniment is the musical score. I wrote the piece using Voyetra MIDI Orchestrator Plus, and added some additional touches in Cakewalk Pro Audio 8. The final mix was synthesized in a single pass on my Sound Blaster Live audio card, using various public domain SoundFont patch sets for the instruments.

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