This week’s cue comes from the score album for the film Home Room. In the accompanying scene, Alicia Browning (Busy Philipps) contemplates her image in a bathroom mirror, having washed off blood from a tragic incident at her school.

The sustained tones in the background would typically be played on a synth, but I recorded a more organic, live-performance alternative: plastic tubes swung overhead. The resulting hollow sound felt perfect for a scene about numbness and detachment.

A fun location in the turn-based strategy game Wizard Ops Tactics was its colorful weapons shop. I wanted the music to maintain the “grumpy magic-user” personality of the store (and game as a whole) so used a lot of orchestral color — slurring low strings, pecking woodwinds, and other impish sonics.

This week’s cue comes from the recently-released score album for the film Home Room, wherein Alicia Browning (Busy Philipps) attempts to spring a friend from a psychiatric hospital.

The scene has a somewhat impish tone, so I picked instrumentation that was brighter than the moodier palette I’d used thus far in the score. Featured are twelve-string guitar, hammered dulcimer, an African percussive instrument called an udu and other percussive goodies. All played by living breathing human beings!

(And yes, the title is a weak pun on the actor’s name.)

This week’s cue comes from the film A Chrismystery, wherein protagonist mom/cop Annie feels contrition after an interpersonal conflict.

The melody begins with the film’s main theme in mirror inversion, meaning that every time a note climbs in the original theme it now descends, and vice versa. This technique doesn’t always produce a musically interesting result, but in this case it created a nicely melancholy tune that still felt related to the movie’s core melody.

In the feature film A Chrismystery, the reluctant sheriff of a quaint Missouri town finds herself amidst the locals, decidedly not sharing their holiday cheer. (Or that of the warm orchestral score.)

This music here reflects the town’s welcoming atmosphere, and perhaps gently pokes fun at Annie as she grumpily questions the colorful residents.