Heart of Summer
Film: 01 Jun 2004
By: TobiasEnhus
N/A
Theatrical release, Summer 2004
http://movies.go.com/movies/H/heartofsummer_2004/

A small-town girl (played by Hillary Duff) heads to Los Angeles for the summer to study at a school for the performing arts. But the real star of this show is the music nerd, Kiwi, who performs Radio-Baton-controlled Kyma in the final concert! Behind the scenes it's our own leading man, Tobias Enhus, who provided the instruments and dubbed in the electronic music track.

Discussion (Descriptions, reviews, discussion):

Music technology nerds rejoice! Finally there's a movie about the geeky sound genius hidden in each of us. Kiwi is the quiet loner at the performing arts school who uses his laptop to turn the sound of a dropped fork into a masterpiece. The real brains behind the sounds come from Tobias Enhus of MachineHead, who brought his Kyma system, laser harps, and radio baton to the set and coached the young actor on his Radio Baton chops. Filmed in an old church with smoke machines generating the ambience of a dusty school gymnasium (to help make all those LEDs look cool), the final concert scene features 45 seconds filmed by three cameras: one on a crane, one on rails, and another one on rails in the back.

After the shooting was completed, everyone on the crew ran up for a closer look. "Are these for real? Are they real instruments? Can you play these?" Playing the instruments, as it turns out, will be Tobias' next task. He has to adapt his existing Kyma/Radio Baton patches and create a performance to synch to what the actor was miming during the shooting.

What kinds of sounds? Well, the dropped fork drum loop for one. Tobias' wife (who plays a music teacher in the film) is a composer/vocalist, and Tobias uses Kyma to slow down her voice to the individual glottal pulses that he can stretch or compress with a wave of the Radio Baton.

This film is bound to start a trend in the industry, and the demand for good-looking techies who know their way around a DSP patch is going to skyrocket. Prepare yourselves both mentally and physically, because electronic music geeks are the new sex symbols! (We promise, we won't let the extreme fame change us in any way!)

Sound designer Tobias Enhus poses with his Capybara, Radio Baton, iBook, Laser harps, MOTM, and various and sundry keyboards (and a radio-controlled camera on a blimp?).