ODIE in Post: The First Notes

Every movie reaches a point where it stops being only pictures. ODIE reached it this month.

Composer Anthony Cozza is scoring the film. The first three reels are in his hands, and last week the first two cues came back.

Here is how a movie actually gets handed to a composer, which is less romantic and more logistical than people imagine. Editor Jay Trautman ran a trim pass on Reel 1, the opening third of the picture. He tightened the opening and put back a small beat that had gone missing in the previous version, the drop of the bus pass. Then he sent Anthony a lightweight video file and three separate guide tracks, one for dialogue, one for effects, one for music. Three doors into the same room. A composer opens whichever one he needs.

A day later, first assistant editor Colleen Murphy delivered Reels 2 and 3. Jay had rebalanced where those two reels break apart so a piece of music would not have to straddle the seam. Reel boundaries are invisible to an audience and enormously visible to whoever has to write across them.

Nick's instruction was one sentence long. Start with Reel 1. The reasoning is practical. It is the most settled stretch of the movie, and it is the part that has to work hardest. If a cue lands in the opening, everything downstream gets easier. After that, he told Anthony to go wherever the picture pulls him.

There is temp music sitting in a lot of the cut right now, placeholder pieces holding the emotional shape until the real thing exists. That is normal, and it is a trap. Directors fall in love with temp. Nick got out ahead of it in writing. "Treat it as a signal of intent, not a target to hit," he told Anthony. "I would rather hear what you hear."

Then, on a Wednesday in the middle of August, the first two cues arrived.

One is called Memories. It is written for the flashback that opens the film, the life Odie wakes up from. The other is called Austin, and it is still growing. Anthony brought in a live drummer for that one, and more takes are on the way. Two demos, two links, and suddenly this movie has a voice it did not have a week ago.

Nick listened and sent both straight to Jay for a second opinion. That is how this crew works. Nothing lands in the cut on one pair of ears.

The picture is still moving underneath all of this. The montages run long and everyone in the room knows it. These reels will get shorter before anything gets locked, which is exactly why the first conversation between editor and composer was about staying loose.

For a month the question in the edit room was what Austin looks like at five in the morning when a man starts walking. Now somebody is answering what it sounds like.

That is a good week.