Who still has access to the original music tracks for the BIONICLE tri

[KopakaFan116]

Hi all,

 

Like many other fans, I'd love to be able to listen to the original, unaltered tracks of musical score composed by Nathan Furst for the BIONICLE movie trilogy from 2003-2005. Nathan Furst was going to upload more tracks to his YouTube channel from his computer, but unfortunately something happened and he lost all the tracks.

 

I was browsing a couple of months ago and came across this video compiled together by Creative Capers entertainment on this page: http://creativecapers.com/our-work/legos-bionicle-trilogy/ and in the video are various music tracks from the film trilogy compiled together for the video. I suspect that whoever made this video has access to the original music tracks for the movies. I wish it were possible for LEGO to give an alright for the tracks to be released somewhere, maybe put them on Nathan Furst's YouTube channel, just for the fan's sake. Thoughts?

Edited May 29, 2016 by KopakaFan116

[Taria Pakari]

There are fan rips of the music, but the quality is obviously a bit off with the removal of other audio and there are quite a few missing tracks. As for official versions of the music, I don't believe any exist publicly apart from the the two tracks Furst uploaded to YT himself.

[TheSkeletonMan939]

Mr. Furst, based on some cryptic Facebook messages, seems to not have any copies of the scores in his personal library, aside from the odds and ends he uploaded to YouTube and elsewhere.

 

There's no telling what the studios have. Maybe they have the full, untouched score, or I should hope they at least still have the "film splits" - dialogue, SFX, and music all in separate audio tracks.

 

I guess no one has any contact info for someone who worked on the films and might have some knowledge to offer?

[ToaTImeLord]

Spotify?

[TheSkeletonMan939]

Spotify?

 

... What about it?

[Taria Pakari]

They wouldn't be spotify.

[TheSkeletonMan939]

Oh, he's asking if they would be on Spotify? Do people actually use that? 

 

I don't know who still "has access to the original music tracks for the BIONICLE trilogy", but I know of a few people who at one point had access.

 

Furst composed about sixty-five minutes of music for Mask of Light. His friend Tim Borquez was credited as the sound supervisor for the film, meaning that he oversaw the mixing of everything, so he definitely got his hands on the score. Another big name in the sound department was Roy Braverman, the sound effects editor and a re-recording mixer (he has a website, it's pretty cool) along with Eric Freeman (re-recording mixers generally fold all the assorted narration, dialogue, music, and SFX down into 5.1 and stereo and make sure it all sounds good). All of these people had a reason to have a copy of the score.

 

The actual score mixing was done by Scott Cochran. Despite sounding orchestral, everything in the score is synthesized through "samples". Furst might have recorded himself playing some instruments, like the piano, but just about anything beyond that was likely through samples. So it was Cochran's job to take the individual instruments and mix them into one big cue/song/whatever. If he wanted one instrument louder, he'd dial that up, or when he wanted something to be quiet, he'd dial it down, and just make sure everything had a chance to shine and make it sound the best it could. So of course he had to work quite extensively with the music.

 

Here's the thing: for those of you who actually care about film music, you'll know that most of the time, if a film gets an OST, there are lots of great cues missing, both because of the limited capacity of CDs as well as the composer perhaps wanting to only showcase his best work to create the best possible-sounding program (balderdash to that, I say! If it was good enough for the film, it was good enough for release!  ). So why can you, by searching the Internet, find all sorts of "complete scores" and "recording sessions"? Because what happened was that some sound editor/mixer/whoever for the film in question decided to do a little underground mischief, and eventually the music leaked to the public. I am not certain that that happened with these Bionicle films; given their low-budget nature, and with the music having not been created by a big-name composer, I would not be surprised if none of the people involved kept a copy of the score for themselves.

 

So if Furst supposedly lost his copies, and none of the sound guys kept copies for themselves, what's left? Well, I mentioned earlier that a responsible movie studio will keep "splits" for their film, which divvy up the narration, dialogue, music, and SFX into their own sound files; when folded down into one, they would comprise the film's complete audio. I should hope that Miramax or Creative Capers has access to the splits. Sometimes the music and effects are kept in the same file, but hopefully since the film was made in the digital age the full splits were preserved...

 

If anyone wants to contact Miramax and/or Creative Capers, be my guest. But there's really no reason to contact the individuals unless it's through an organized effort, because it'd be so rude for 30 Bionicle fans to email Roy Braverman or Tim Borquez for their work on films they completed over a decade ago.

Edited June 1, 2016 by TheSkeletonMan939

[Erasmus Graves]

On YouTube, a bloke named joxpax100 has uploaded 23 mostly intact fairly good quality pieces from the original trilogy. Another guy named Francisco Machado has put them together in a mix. It is far from complete but there are a lot of great & good ones here. Here 'tis, starting with the opener:

 

 

Other parts of the soundtrack can be found scattered across YouTube, but never complete, sadly.

Edited June 4, 2016 by Erasmus Graves

[TheSkeletonMan939]

Looks like he got a lot of the music from doing the old "split to mono -> invert one channel" trick in Audacity. That works when the dialogue is perfectly centered, but you can still hear some stuff in the tracks he uploaded. Good try though.

 

The best we can possibly get from the available material, including the 5.1 mix, is within the BioMedia Project's latest film music release, which I worked on extensively with Vahkiti.