We had the good fortune of getting the inside scoop on Nickelodeon's hit series, the reboot of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Sebastian Evans, composer for the show, shares with TV Maze some of his inspiration and ideas, as well as how he became a successful composer. From his head-bob inducing main title theme to his seamless blend of far east and western musical styles, Sebastian provides a lively score to TMNT that’s helped reinvent Nickelodeon’s Emmy-winning series for a whole new generation.
Sebastian has also created scores for other hugely popular shows including Cartoon Network’s Ben 10: Omniverse, starring Yuri Lowenthal and Joe DiMaggio, Transformers: Animated, starring David Kaye and Tara Strong as well as Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go, starring Greg Cipes and Mark Hamill for Disney. He has also worked on various projects for Warner Brothers and Adult Swim.
His music can be heard via SoundCloud here: Click here
What is the coolest part of doing music for a classic Franchise like TMNT?
The coolest part has to be working on a franchise that I idolized from my childhood. When I watched the 80’s series as a child I never thought I’d one day be creating the background score as well as the main theme for the reboot of the series 25 years later. It’s very humbling and a bit intimidating to be a part of something with so much history.
Who are some of your biggest musical inspirations, both in film scoring and regular music?
That’s hard to narrow down to just a few. Some of my biggest inspirations would have to be, Raymond Scott, Peter Tchaikovsky, Bjork, Thomas Newman, Nobuo Uematsu, George Gershwin, Danny Elfman, Edvard Grieg, Tool, Michael Nyman, Timbaland, John Williams (of course). I should say that this list would probably vary a bit depending on what day I was asked.
What is your dream project to work on? And dream collaborators?
I’ve dreamt of creating a score for a TV show set in a world based on the video game “Crimson Skies”. If I had it my way it would be an HBO produced show that would run for 6 seasons (12 episodes per season). The show would be written by Lawrence Kasdan and Robert Rodat and directed by Ridley Scott. Jordan Weisman, the creator of the world, would be on board to advise various aspects of production. It would star Ryan Reynolds as the lead character Nathan Zachary. I’d do the score, of course, and from time to time we’d have special music written by Jack White. That’s my dream project. Not that I’ve thought about it that much.
If you could re-score any TV show with your own music, whether classic or present on TV, which would you and how would you do it?
Whoa! What a great question. I’d love to re-score “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. I only say that because as a child, I used to sit at the upright piano my parents rented me for hours and score certain passages of the show. I’d get out my two boomboxes and set up my ghetto-rigged multitrack system with cassette tapes. I’d record a passage on boombox A, take out the tape and put it in boombox B and push play while pushing record on boombox A and playing another passage with the previous passage playing in the background. And do that over and over. Dennis McCarthy’s work on the show was awesome, by the way.
How do you compose your music? As in, what is your set-up?
Well, I use Cubase for my DAW. It runs on a 2013 Mac Pro. I use an M-Audio 88 keyboard for playing MIDI samples. My programmed MIDI switches are triggered by Korg’s nano controllers. I use 2 Promise Pegasus R8’s for sample storage and recording. My audio interface is an Universal Audio Apollo 16 Thunderbolt and I’m a huge fan of Universal Audio plugins. That’s pretty much the core of my set-up.
What makes the score for TMNT different than your previous projects?
I guess the biggest difference from projects I’ve worked on is how different mood, style and tone can be from one episode to the next. For the most part, previous shows I’ve worked on had a more weighted degree of consistency in mood and style all the way through. There were times these things veered off a bit depending on the story but it was pretty stable. Because this version of TMNT has so much history to draw on, and so many iterations to draw on, each episode can feel completely different. One episode could be a ninja rescue mission during an alien invasion and the next could be a horror movie. A love story could follow that. There is always the core of the family between Splinter, the turtles, April and Casey that keeps it all together and flowing nicely no matter what’s going on. But in my personal experience, this is my first time working with that specific challenge.
Written by rand01 on Aug 8, 2016
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