After seeing the Disney film “Fantasia” when he was young, Ari Fisher said he fell in love with the music and became obsessed with film scores.
Fisher, a master’s student in the Jacobs School of Music’s composition department, is premiering his score for “The Return of Draw Egan” at 7 p.m. Saturday at the IU Cinema.
Fisher was selected as the winner of the first Jon Vickers Scoring Award, a competition that awards $5,000 to fully score the 1916 silent western.
Although each contestant was originally supposed to score a five-minute clip of the film, Fisher said he needed more context in order to properly score it.
“I would watch this five-minute clip countless times, but there were some plot things that I wanted to know better,” he said. “So, I went even further and watched the whole movie on YouTube so I could really understand the entire storyline.”
One day, Fisher said he received an email saying he won the competition. Immediately overjoyed, he said he went straight to working on the rest.
Due to the fast-paced action in the film, Fisher said one of the biggest challenges of scoring it was figuring out what to focus on and when to line up the music with the film’s editing.
Even with his consistent work ethic, Fisher said the score took him longer than expected to complete.
It took him about a month of "buckled-down work," he said.
The competition allowed Fisher to compose a score written for a small-scale orchestra. He said it was written for woodwinds, strings, piano and various percussive instruments.
However, he said he was unable to put everything he wanted to in the score.
“I wanted there to be a gun in the score, but they wouldn’t let me,” he said. “Actually, I just didn’t have the courage to ask them.”
Because of his early exposure to film and music, Fisher said composition came naturally to him.
“I started violin lessons at age five, and I guess my passion for music just grew from there,” he said. “I started exploring composition on my own in junior high school.”
Fisher came to IU as a freshman in 2010. At that time, he said the department for film scoring was just beginning to shape into what it is today.
“That’s what I want to do with my career, is be a composer who participates with motion picture and television,” he said. “This school is finally developing a program where that can be done.”
Citing John Williams as his primary inspiration for film composition, Fisher said he tried to create a unique score with slight references to his favorite composers.
“There are little nuances,” he said. “You’d have to really know your ‘Star Wars’ scores to get my references I’m poking at.”
Fisher said he is also inspired by video game composer Koji Kondo and Russian classical composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Looking forward to Saturday’s premiere, Fisher said he is excited to share something he created with the community after working so hard on it. When it is finished, it is a huge accomplishment, he said..
“It’s like a baby being born,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing."
