Dario Argento’s DEEP CUTS
This year, I was extremely fortunate to work on a project involving the legendary Dario Argento.
Severin Films was tasked with releasing Turno di Notte (“Night Shift”), an incredible and truly wild 1980s horror anthology show by Argento, as well as some fun "Nightmare” shorts, a selection of 3 to 5 minute short horror stories, as part of a collection of Dario Argento “Deep Cuts.”
However, they faced a challenge: the episodes couldn't be released in the US due to their extensive use of copyrighted music, featuring tracks ranging from Michael Jackson’s “Bad” to John Williams’ Star Wars suite.
Thanks to a wonderful connection with David at Severin Films, I was brought on board to help solve this problem.
The Challenge
My task was to extract the existing music from the episodes and create new “soundalike” pieces. The aim was to replace the original tracks while preserving the very unique spirit that Argento envisioned for the show.
Removing the existing tracks
The first step was to remove the existing copyrighted music tracks from the single flattened audio track. Even one year ago, this process would have been significantly more arduous, but thanks to some new technology, I was able to split the audio tracks up by dialogue, music, SFX, and more.
While the results were never perfect, it gave me a great starting point to go in and clean up the sound, retain fidelity, and create space for my new replacement tracks.
Creating new compositions
Part of what intrigued me about this project from the very beginning was the wide range of music that Argento used in the series that, now, needed to be replaced. Creating “soundalike” tracks to retain the spirit of the original episodes gave me a new challenge to face every day!
Whether it was George Michael, Pink Floyd, or Bernard Herrmann, I was up for the task of creating a brand new composition that was uniquely my own, but still evoked the feeling of the original music.
In this clip, I replaced a handful of John Williams pieces from Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind with original music. I also had to match the sound quality and aesthetic of the original tape which was such a fun challenge. I couldn’t have asked for a more fun and unique project!