[Morton] Apollo 11's story — these guys were
really putting their neck on the line. [Chuckles]
That takes some guts!
I think what I wanted to do with my score
was just touch on the sense of danger a little bit
and what must have been going through their heads
when they were getting suited up.
I wanted it to be a little more visceral.
I'm Matt Morton. I'm the composer for Apollo 11.
Todd and I have been buddies for a really long time;
we made Dinosaur 13.
It had a brief theatrical run, but it really caught on
when it went on TV.
It ended up winning an Emmy
for outstanding science and technology programming in 2015.
After we won the Emmy for CNN, they approached us
looking for — kind of, "Okay, what's your next thing?"
So we did a short film called The Last Steps,
which was about Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon.
And that was very much a dry run for Apollo 11.
[Drum beats]
I did that story in the same way, but I let myself
use any instrument that came to mind,
and there's this juxtaposition between
the very modern-sounding music and
the period footage that you're seeing.
And that's got its own kind of energy to it,
but, at the same time, I wondered
what it would have been like
if I would have stuck to only 1972 instruments.
And so when we got a chance to do Apollo 11,
I took a page from that lesson and
just decided to do a different approach.
[Slow drum beats]
My initial vision for it was to try to
make it sound like you were hearing musicians from 1969,
just like you're seeing the faces of the astronauts
and mission control and people watching the launch in 1969.
It made me go back to the origins of,
"Okay, where did all this electronic music come from?"
And it just so happened that kind of the big bang
of synthesizers happened right around the time
of the Apollo missions.
I completely fell head over heels at that point.
By the fall of 2017, my sonic vision for the score
was coming into focus. It was at that point that
I found out about Moog reissuing the 3C, which is this guy.
They only made 25 of them.
Essentially, I just — I fell in love with the instrument
and it just totally captivated me,
and I spent hours and hours and hours down here
recording all kinds of stuff nobody will ever hear.
[Mission control sounds and synthesizer music]
There's nothing like having the real thing and having
immediate access to all of the parameters
in front of you. Like, literally, I'll be in the middle
of experimenting and just grab
patch cords and re-patch.
There's a feel to that. It just encourages play.
[Synthesizer music]
There's never really one process —
tons of experimentation and just trying to always record,
and when I stumble on sounds or ways of configuring
the modular, based on what you're hearing
or the way you want to kind of, like,
guide the Ouija board, then you can make changes
to the instrument in real time.
It's very time-consuming. [Laughs]
You could do this all in software, technically,
and a lot of the cues are many layers of patches.
There are layers and layers and layers of synths in there,
underneath the strings and kind of swinging them up.
So I have synth versions
of all those different pitches.
And each of those had to be rendered in real time,
synced up with the picture and its real audio.
I didn't use midi-notes. I played everything in real time.
But for me, there's just something totally different
about reaching out and being able to touch this thing.
All the synths — I'm basically slowly opening
the filters on all of them so that we get
really big right here.
Now, the last thing that was added
to this cue is this string pad, and we wanted to
do that because, at this point, we knew
the trajectory was right, they were on their way home,
and they got a good burn. Everything looked good
and everybody in the control room was clapping.
They said — I think Charlie Duke, the capcom, was like, "Hallelujah!"
So you hear this string bed come up and it's kind of
like everything's going to be all right.
I really went out on a limb on this score,
and I felt like that would be a cool experiment
to just use instruments of the era and then
see what a modern guy could do.
I'm the only element that's modern.
Everything else you're seeing and hearing is from back then.
So I looked at my music as being able to play the role
of kind of bridging the gap between 2019 and 1969.
Even though I'm using dated instruments,
I think it comes off as a bridge to modern people
because I'm using modern musical idioms
to communicate with you.
[Speaking on telephone] Just this thing down is $35,000!
[Laughing] [Voice on telephone] Oh my god.