Mark Gordon has worked closely with the Digital Film Archive on several major restoration projects, including creating new scores for two landmark works of early Northern Irish independent filmmaking, The Boxer and Open Asylum. Here, he reflects on the creative challenges and unexpected joys of revisiting these films for contemporary audiences.

Creating new music and restoring audio for The Boxer and Open Asylum was a journey both into the narratives of each film per se, but also a real insight into the motivations and creative decisions made by filmmakers working decades ago with a limited set of tools and doing extraordinary work to push their storytelling through all the analogue constraints of the time. For music, it was very clear from the original cuts that less was more in terms of score, or needle drops in both projects. Unlike contemporary filmmaking, these projects let the drama breathe far more and were sparing in their use of music. Nonetheless, having to replace globally selling (and totally unclearable) artists who had been used in the original projects with a new score meant we had to take a totally different approach with the directors and uncouple them from music they had watched hundreds of times as their edits moved towards locked pictures. This was not about replacing cues with soundalikes; it was about using the full force of contemporary score to deliver cues that were in sync with the picture but also used new and innovative colours.

One of the best moments in the creation of new audio and music for Open Asylum was when we played the score live to a screening of the film at the Belfast Film Festival. Director Colm Villa had been hugely invested in the new score as it developed, and alongside a new pass of sound design (knowing, for example, that we couldn’t ADR anything and thus had to live with sometimes very scratchy mono SFX and dialogue), we had created a score that balanced noir and contemporary tonal sounds and drones to create something totally different to the original score but following all the emotional beats regardless. We also licensed some tracks, including songs by Arborist, but for the live score we played as a four-piece, including trumpeter Linley Hamilton, whose haunting and stunning playing elevated a story that was in part bleak and unremitting but also contained moments of levity and humour. It was a thrill for us to do this for Colm and have him attend to see and feel this creative response in a sold-out performance.

Watch Open Asylum