See the post ‘Far Away’ film (below) for more information on the actual film itself, the plot and things like that. This post is about the scene where Alex gets lost and uses his map to try and figure out where he is in the middle of nowhere.

When I first looked at the ‘Lost with Map Scene’ footage, my immediate thought was: ‘How am I going to write music that is not in the forefront to the audience by not disrupting the speech but also creates the right feeling for the moment?’ I watched it over and over without music and when I watched other films I thought a bit about how they achieved this in similar kinds of scenes. There are so many films that do this well but the most obvious one to reference is ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, which constantly hints the theme in the background and has many melodies and motifs that come back throughout, often subtly. Done well, background music sounds coherent in style, texture and feeling to the main themes and melodies. I wanted a similar feel with this background music for the ‘Lost in the Map Scene’, which is why it is all on classical guitar with a similar style accompaniment to the main theme, and although the chord progression is different to every other piece in the film, the melody is hinted subtly in several places. I went for a twangy sound on the guitar to hint a banjo-type instrument.

All Music by Oliver Daniel Nicholls 2015
Classical Guitar performed by William Knight