According to the Disney Channel, their Emmy Award–winning original movie "High School Musical" (HSM) has been seen by over 250 million viewers worldwide since its debut in 2006. During the summer of 2007, Disney broke yet another record by capturing the largest audience ever for a basic-cable telecast when 18.2 million viewers tuned into "High School Musical 2", followed by equally staggering success for its soundtrack, which topped the charts as the No. 2 album of 2007 in the US at 6.5 million units. This year, Disney will raise the bar once again with "High School Musical 3: Senior Year" (HSM3), the first major motion picture release of the HSM series now in final production and due in US theaters October 24th.
Throughout the HSM series, the core creative team has remained the same (why mess with success?), with composer and songwriter David Lawrence penning and producing the soundtracks for all three movies. Just after landing the position as composer and songwriter for the first HSM movie, and only weeks before production began, David made the transition to an all-native, MOTU-based studio and has never looked back. Since then, David's filmography includes Disney Channel original movies "The Cheetah Girls 2" (2006) and "The Cheetah Girls: One World" (2008), several seasons of the CBS network prime time TV dramas "Jericho" and "Cane", and A&E's new prime time series "The Cleaner". David begins a new CBS series this fall called "Harper's Island".
As David explained in our first interview, the songs and underscore are a primary element of the High School Musical series. In this interview, we asked David what new challenges he faced in writing and producing an HSM-style soundtrack for major motion picture release.
MOTU: With its incredible success since 2006, the HSM franchise needs no introduction, but in a nutshell, what is the basic story line for HSM 3?
David: It's the senior year for everybody, and they are graduating. So the story centers around where everybody is going to go from here. Are Troy and Gabriella going to end up together? Are Chad and Taylor going to end up together? What's going to happen to Sharpay and Ryan? So its basically all the decisions they have to make, now that they are graduating from high school, where they are going to college and what's going to happen to their friendships.
MOTU: A "coming of age" story then.
David: And of course I can't tell you any of the answers [laughs].
MOTU: We'll have to go see the movie when it comes out, of course.
David: That's the idea, yes.
MOTU: Do you feel the target demographic has changed for the theatrical release, or is it squarely aimed at the same core "tweener" (8-14 year old) audience as the prior TV movies?
David: It is definitely now aimed at an older teenage audience.
MOTU: So it's kind of growing up along with the generation it originally appealed to.
David: Yes, exactly.
MOTU: Can you give us any insight into Disney's decision to make the jump to a major motion picture release for HSM 3? Was there pressure to do a theatrical release? Anxiety? Or was this the clear and natural next step?
David: I think it was absolutely the clear and natural next step because of the success of the first two movies. The Walt Disney Company felt that they could reach a much larger audience if they took this global through the feature division, and get the studio behind the entire marketing campaign effort. So it seemed like a very logical conclusion.
MOTU: Assuming that this movie represents the final encapsulation of at least the first run of this movie series, it does make a lot of sense.
David: Exactly.
"I had six days to write it, orchestrate it, do all the rewrites, and hand it to my copyist on day seven. Because the next day we were scoring on the scoring stage."
MOTU: You reported that the original movie had about 80 minutes of music in a 98 minute movie. Is HSM 3 about the same?
David: Yes, it is similar. This movie is about 102 or 103 minutes, before end credits, and the total is about 106. And there are about 55 minutes of music, total. There's about 30 minutes of songs and 25 minutes of score.
MOTU: And you did the underscore for this one?
David: Yes, I did the underscore.
MOTU: And any songs?
David: It was interesting. At the beginning, we were asked to write several large-scale production numbers. And over the course of the five months that we were writing all these things, the direction of the film had changed, and subsequently it was decided that these songs were not going work for the new direction of the movie. And so obviously my partner Faye Greenberg and I were disappointed, but we were still — and I am still — very lucky and thrilled to have been asked to do the underscore for the film because part of that is bridging all the gaps between the songs and adding a heightened level of romance and comedy to the movie that needs to be there to help bridge the gaps for the characters and the songs. So it was a great challenge and thrill to be asked to do that. It was quite a task.
MOTU: And you've been in scoring sessions this week?
David: We just finished late last night. I had six days to... I was given the movie eight days ago — nine days ago. And I had six days to write it, orchestrate it, do all the rewrites, and hand it to my copyist on day seven. Because the next day we were scoring on the scoring stage.
MOTU: That is insane.
David: It was very insane, but it got done and it got done at a very, very high level.
MOTU: Does that mean that the songs and the production numbers were already finished?
David: Yes they were done about six months ago.
MOTU: So you probably have tie-in, or lead-in, or transition portions of the score that go in and out of these songs?
David: There were situations where I had to tie in, that weren't previously composed or written by the songwriters. So I had to give the illusion that you were always just leading into the song without even knowing it. In some cases, I actually had to recompose sections of front parts of songs to make them work with the underscore and the dialog, so that by the time she starts singing, for example, you hardly know she even started. So that was the excitement and the challenge.
MOTU: In eight days.
David: Six days. [laughs] Although in fairness I did have an extra half a day to fix one cue [laughs again]. So we can say six and half days.
MOTU: That's completely insane....
David: Yes, it is. But it is good to know you can do it, though.
"We are doing all of this in Digital Performer and just couldn't be happier."
MOTU: So where does it stand in the process now?
David: We are actually mixing the score over the next three days at Warner Brothers on their SSL 9000 system. Matt LaPoint is preparing all of the score stems from the stage and Cary Butler will be mixing it.
MOTU: Are you ultimately supplying multi-track stems?
David: Ultimately, we'll probably have about a hundred tracks of orchestra, plus prerecords, which we will then mix down to eight stereo pairs to deliver to the final dub stage.
MOTU: Where there special challenges for the theatrical release, versus the made-for-TV movie format of the last two films? If so, what adjustments did you need to make to your workflow, if any?
David: The most significant challenge was the creative and artistic one I mentioned earlier, not the least of which was the logistical challenge of turning it in in such a short period of time. Separate from that, the other challenge was, we were not writing for a cable movie anymore, we were writing for the large screen, so we were writing for large orchestra, which meant serious orchestration, serious adjustment in how you are composing for the screen so that it "lands" and translates, and then bridging the songs together. So there were many more complexities involved. All of it gets heightened, in a sense. As the director sees on day two where I'm at, and day three, then we start making changes and can we make it bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger... These become the challenges.
"We've mixed the last two episodes of CBS's "The Cleaner" in version 6 and have been really happy with it."
MOTU: Aside from HSM3, you've been really busy lately, haven't you?
David: The last few years have been an incredible blessing for me and my family. So not a single complaint.
MOTU: That's great.
David: Separate from High School Musical, I just finished another feature called "Christmas, Inc." for Warner Brothers Worldwide — yet another project that I did entirely on my G5s. There were hundreds of tracks of orchestra and prerecords — it's a massive, quirky Christmas comedy that is going to be released in October. The worldwide release title is "Navidad S.A." (Spanish for "Christmas"), and we just finished this project simultaneously with High School Musical 3, all on our core G5s and satellite G5s. We did Navidad S.A. in Prague, brought that back, and we are now engineering and mixing that score. Matt LaPoint is doing the mixing and he's doing an incredible job, but he has been really pushing the Macs to the absolute limit. I'm really looking forward to a couple of new Intel 8-core towers at this point, to handle all the plug-ins and sample libraries we are running.
MOTU: These projects sound truly massive.
David: My hope is that by late fall, early winter, even if it is over Christmas break and I'm not working through Christmas — but right now it looks like I may be, but if I'm not — I'd like to install at least two new 8-cores with the latest version of DP6, and then we can just rock and roll.
MOTU: And you are doing A&E's "The Cleaner", too, right?
David: Yes.
MOTU: And when does that season wrap up?
David: We wrap up in the middle of September, right in time to start a brand new series for CBS called "Harper's Island" with the same guys I did "Jericho" with. And that's a horror/thriller that's really exciting and I'm anxious to start that. It's going to be on CBS this fall. So we've got "Navidad SA" coming out, we've got "Harper's Island" in the fall, and then we are writing and producing songs and the soundtrack for a foreign film with the producers of High School Musical called "It's the Music" that's going to be first released in Russia and then it's going to go worldwide from there.
MOTU: Not a moment's rest.
David: So we are doing all of this in Digital Performer and just couldn't be happier.
MOTU: You'll definitely have to move fast when the time comes to make the transition.
David: Well that's exactly it. We've just gotta figure out when, because you and I both know, it's not just a day's job. I've gotta pull, yank, remove, install and make sure we're all good to go.
MOTU: The other approach you might think about taking is to set up the new rig in parallel with your current system. You get your new machines in, and you fire 'em up and you get stuff installed and you start messing around with it as you go.
David: I think that is an excellent idea. Matt LaPoint suggested that to me just last week and I said, "Hmm." And it got me thinking. So I think that is what we are going to do.
MOTU: That will allow you to get things moving and address transition issues as they come up, without the time crunch, because you are still up and running with your current system.
"I still feel one of the most significant enhancements for me has been the plug-in pre-rendering, which has been a huge CPU saver for me. It's just awesome."
David: Speaking of which: I just got 6.01 today. Should I install it and use it or wait for the next update?
MOTU: Version 6.01 is certainly better than 6.0, so I would definitely use it. And we are continuing to work towards yet another release.
David: For my core composing, I'm still on 5.13 and plan to make the full transition to Version 6 in mid-September when I start "Harper's Island" for CBS.
MOTU: Yes, it's a good idea to make version transitions between projects, not right in the middle of a project.
David: Actually, we are already in the process of making the transition in stages. I haven't composed in version 6, but we've mixed the last two episodes of "The Cleaner" in version 6 — also mixed by Matt — and have been really happy with it. I still feel one of the most significant enhancements for me has been the plug-in pre-rendering, which has been a huge CPU saver for me. It's just awesome.
MOTU: Yes, and DP6 extends that to virtual instruments now, too.
David: My plan, once I get all this stuff transferred over to new Mac towers, is to get off of my satellite video computer and just run DV QuickTime movies on my main machine so I can take advantage of running everything on the host computer.
MOTU: Do you use Virtual VTR right now?
David: I use DVDx, which is excellent. I just pop it over to my video computer, load it into DP and run FireWire DV output through a Canopus. The whole thing is synced to my main DP host machine via time code. When I get a new 8-core, I plan to install a dedicated internal drive, just for the video.
MOTU: What kind of screen are you monitoring on?
David: A 42-inch plasma.
MOTU: Thank you for your time, David.
David: My pleasure.