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02:30So tell us about this.
02:34You worked on the previous two shows,
02:37Band of Brothers and The Pacific.
02:40Tell us about your history with this,
02:42the World War II franchise.
02:44First of all, thanks for coming out.
02:45This is incredible.
02:47I'm a little out of breath
02:54because I put myself into that a little too much,
02:56but I got my start.
03:04I'm in this business because of Michael Kamen.
03:11And one of the projects that we worked on
03:13was Band of Brothers.
03:14I was one of his orchestrators.
03:16And that was 2001, so 23 years ago.
03:22And then we lost him.
03:24And the producers came to me on The Pacific
03:27and said, would you want to do it
03:28with Hans and Jeff Snelly?
03:31I'm like, no, but okay.
03:34They're not here, are they?
03:37So I did it.
03:38And then Masters came up,
03:41and Gary called me, Gary Gutsman,
03:43and he said, how do you feel about working with us?
03:45And I said, no.
03:47And I said, dude, I just want to do this myself.
03:49I wanted to have a single voice.
03:51And yeah, I had an idea for it.
03:55And I mean, sorry to choke up,
03:58but that's a love letter to Michael.
04:08Sorry.
04:10Can we get Carlos back on the screen?
04:12He was so much more fun than me.
04:14Oh my god.
04:16So tell us, as the tension builds in the series,
04:20the orchestra grows.
04:22Yeah, it grows.
04:23So we figured out this cool thing.
04:25The B-17s in all of the action scenes
04:27have this specific hum.
04:29I think it was A-flat.
04:31I'm pretty sure it was A-flat.
04:33And so if I wanted to be more tense up there,
04:35I could write in A or B-flat,
04:37something against the key.
04:39This is super nerdy for those of you who aren't composers out there.
04:43And if we wanted to calm things down,
04:45I would just write in the key of A-flat.
04:47And they're like, oh, everything's fine.
04:49And then Crosby would throw up,
04:51and we'd go drop another bomb.
04:53So we learned stuff like that,
04:55but then what I also was experimenting with
04:57is let's, as more forces grow,
04:59and as we are more successful,
05:01let's grow the orchestra.
05:03So actually the first round of recording sessions
05:05were a few less people,
05:07and then we got more,
05:09and then we could double,
05:11and then we could double.
05:13How many times?
05:15I think the main title
05:17was probably 160 players
05:19by the time we finished it.
05:21I mean, it's not something to brag about.
05:23Sorry.
05:25It's really not.
05:27It just couldn't stop.
05:29So talk about the inspiration for the main title.
05:31Also, there aren't 160 people here
05:33and they sounded amazing.
05:35Right?
05:37Tell us about the inspiration for the main title.
05:45The inspiration, it was the first thing I wrote.
05:49I had, I like to approach new things differently, so I'd actually at the behest of my brilliant
05:55manager Ray Yee, he said go rent a house and just write, just figure it out.
06:02So I went to Kingston, Washington, this island off the coast of Seattle, and I wrote every
06:07day for three weeks, and stared at tugboats, and came back after three weeks, he goes,
06:11did you figure it out?
06:12I'm like, nope.
06:14I got nothing.
06:17And then I literally went into my living room frustrated one night, and I have this voice
06:21memo still from July 14th, 2022, and I just sat down and played the main title theme,
06:27so I figured it out.
06:28And the inspiration was, we'd been so elegiac and not safe, but just somber with the Pacific
06:36and Michael's beautiful Band of Brothers theme.
06:40I wanted to have that same nobility, but I just wanted it to launch, and the hardest
06:45thing for me was figuring out how to make it, like every pun intended, fly.
06:50And so that was the inspiration, was flight.
06:54So when you write, are you writing off of script, or do you actually get finished footage,
07:00VFX, and then?
07:02Because it's a streaming show, the cool thing is, we got all nine episodes at once.
07:06So I got to watch this entire thing.
07:07We keep referring to it as the movie, because all of us think of it as the nine-hour movie,
07:12which who wants to sign up for that?
07:14I'll do it.
07:15Sign me up twice.
07:20So I got to see the whole thing, and what's cool about that is you can write, you can
07:23like, today I'm going to do Captain Egan's story and work on that arc, because I could
07:27see it.
07:28In a lot of episodic television, you get it, you're like, what's happening to Spencer this
07:34week on All-American, and the next week you're like, oh man, I really screwed that up, because
07:37I didn't know that was going to happen.
07:40So this, we got to see the whole thing.
07:41But we worked on it for, we had months, and I had months of writing time, we had years
07:45of finishing.
07:46Yeah.
07:47I'm sad it's over.
07:50I'm sad tonight's over, but thank you so much for being here.
07:53Thank you.
07:54Blake Neely, Masters of the Air!