In 2012, Mark Pedante and I co-wrote the score to the short film The Patriot Act, produced by our friend Jay Shapiro, about a team of would-be thieves who break into the wrong home and stumble across a terrorist plot. We wrote approximately 11 minutes of score for the 20 minute short.
With Mark in LA while I was in Dallas, the process was a bit challenging, but he and I had played together before and we trusted each other musically.
After being launched by the director and producer, Mark and I each put together a bunch of quick demos of what we thought the score could sound like, traded them, and talked through what we liked and didn’t like. We also divided up the cues to try to play to our individual strengths as writers as well as the strengths of our equipment, with Mark primarily using hardware synths while I used soft synths.
Below is one of the cues I worked on; the related section of the film had several rapid-fire story and emotional beats to hit, it was fun weaving the score quickly between atonal, ambient, and traditional/modern action styles.
– The Patriot Act Score: Cue 10 (unmixed), by Steven Weigle & Mark Pedante, (c) 2012