Cue of the Week: “A Happy Reunion”

I’m going deep into the archives for this one, back to when I was a film scoring student at the University of Southern California. I wrote this finale for an adorable thesis film called Big Bucks for Buddha, pitched as “a love triangle between a boy, a girl, and a dog”. You can probably figure out the tone of the film from that of the music.

Budding composers were treated very well by USC in those days, with access to a pro-grade recording studio and some the best student musicians and filmmakers in the country. Digital instruments being primitive at the time, we were “forced” to work with real orchestral players. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise: my sampler-based music from that era is unlistenable, but I find that live-recorded cues like this have aged rather well.