A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
Music from the motion picture
by Lance Treviño and Caleb Miller

The First Step
Composed by Lance Treviño
Additional composition by Caleb Miller

“This is the main title score from the film. A beautiful piece written by Lance before he had even seen the entire production draft. Lance creates a nest of suspended strings before dropping in the memorable main theme melody which would saturate the rest of the material we would write for the film. This was actually a difficult piece to mix, and I eventually re-did the mix for the whole cue after finishing the credits so that I could get the space and air that I had captured in later parts of the movie.”

– Caleb Miller

Unsettled
Composed by Caleb Miller & Lance Treviño

“One of my favourite pieces from the movie. The violin is particularly dynamic here and I love the sound. ‘Unsettled’ is based on a cue written by Lance early in production called ‘Nice Guy’. ‘Nice Guy’ was a lighter look at the main character Aaron and the people he had made a positive impact on. I wrote ‘Unsettled’ as the flip side – the emotional side of losing him and also to represent the change in relationship between Aaron and his girlfriend, Sarah.”

– Caleb Miller

The Drive
Composed by Caleb Miller & Lance Treviño

“This is based on a cue written by Lance earlier in the movie. The filtered synth work here really helps add a new layer of interest to the score and fits well with moving sequences such as when the characters are driving. Jared, our director, also contributed here by adding the kick drum, which I think helps add an element of strangeness to the piece.”

– Caleb Miller

The Incident
Composed by Caleb Miller & Lance Treviño

“This piece explores a very dark area of the film, the night out where the incident is finally revealed to the audience. This was actually the first part of the soundtrack I wrote. Lance had already nailed the main theme and I wanted to solidify the journey by doing a difficult cue from later in the movie to give us some solid direction. This worked really well, as from here on we knew we had to blend this dark sound design with our chamber music style with essentially strings meaning light, and synthetic elements meaning dark – and we loosely stuck to this idea throughout.”

– Caleb Miller

Time Heals
Composed by Caleb Miller & Lance Treviño

“The main theme melody has been augmented here to create a much darker, sadder piece about how time can heal the damage done to us by losing a loved one. The piece transitions into a synthetic atmosphere with light guitar picking – a very melancholy sound before moving back into the sorrowful strings landscape from earlier. This was one of the final pieces written for the movie.”

– Caleb Miller

Why
Composed by Caleb Miller & Lance Treviño

“The melody from ‘Why’ is one of my favourites in the score, especially as it moves through the key change and eventually sets up the last two cues ‘Conclusions’ and ‘For The Ones Left Behind’. All of the pieces for this movie required such subtlety to integrate with the dialogue-driven interviews and montages – this is a good example of the writing and instrumentation Lance and I used throughout the whole movie, blending synthetic elements with chamber music to be dynamically woven through dialogue. One of my favourite pieces from the film.”

– Caleb Miller

For The Ones Left Behind
Composed by Caleb Miller & Lance Treviño

“The director, Jared, really gave me complete freedom with this piece. He wanted me to set up the conclusion of the movie well and then he allowed me to take it anywhere I liked. I used this opportunity to tie in all the melodies I could remember from the past hour-plus of music and then I tried to also use all of the instrumentation as well. The guitar appears briefly to support a ‘call and response’ with the piano and even the marimba is used as the piece heads into the passionate action strings sequence.
This piece for me, more than any of the others, really had to sum up the experience of losing someone in a tragedy. I had written the title “For The Ones Left Behind” before I began writing the music for it and I knew I had to make it live up to its name, a gift for the unlucky ones left alive to feel. It had to summarise the darkness of wishing you were not alone and the wonder of not knowing how people you love can do terrible things. When I listened back to the piece after orchestration, I felt like I had really succeeded. It’s just as beautiful and tragic as I hoped and it also managed to summarise something else that I didn’t necessarily intend – Lance and I put huge amounts of our time, effort and souls into this. Writing and synthestrating this amount of score is a huge undertaking, and especially while both of us worked other films and projects, we sacrificed our personal lives, time with our partners and sleep to passionately provide a score to this amazing film. For the Ones Left Behind, by being a collage of the themes throughout also summarises all the effort and soul that went into this.
I hope you like the movie as much as we do, and I hope you all continue to support independent filmmaking”

– Caleb Miller

All music © 2013 | Mac40 Music