Flying Tiger (Film Soundtrack) – Keith Lay, composer

Flying Tiger was an ambitious project of Keith Alan Morris, who had just joined the faculty of Full Sail around 2004. He asked me to compose the music to this project, and Mike Orlowski to handle audio postproduction – we both agreed because it would be fun to work together. Plus, we liked the unique story and Keith’s storytelling talent with images with the new 24p video technology and his previous short films.

Flying Tiger is the story about a secret kept between a boy, Seth, and his father: Seth could fly. When the father discovered his boy’s ability at a young age he moved the family to the countryside in the midwest in order to give him room to develop his talents and physical powers. But, under no circumstances was Seth allowed to let anyone see him fly or even talk about it – even with his mother and sister. Now in his high school years, he is on the Tigers football team and his physical prowess on the field fosters jealousy and hatred. Fellow students are out to hurt him. At the same time, an oddball fossil hunter, Jimmy, tresspasses on the family acreage and sees Seth flying and becomes obsessed with capturing video of the miracle, regardless of the threat that Seth’s father represents. The question facing Seth is whether or not to ‘go public’ and stop hiding his abilities…

The three main characters are: Seth, played by Bryan Shany; Sherry, played by Abbey Wathen [see “Runaway Hearts”], and Jimmy, played by Casey Clark.

The above trailer culls together several music themes I created for the film. All of the music tracks were created in 5.1 surround using my Pro Tools TDM system. The sample library was from Bitheadz Unity, sequenced in ProTools. The sound is surprisingly realistic for the date – sample libraries were still rather new animals in 2004 because the computer technology was not up to the bandwidth to handle large libraries and video at the same time. (This score was created was using a year 2000 Mac G4: 450MHz processor; 256MB RAM with the ProTools core and 3 farm cards installed, version 5.5.1). I could watch a tiny video while composing. At the time, it was quite high end. We’ve come a long way in technology!

Regardless, it’s an example of what I used to tell my students: compose ‘around the samples you have’ – knowing what samples in your library sound best in what registers: that is still true today and will remain so for the future.

This movie was never officially released, and though it does have an IMDB number, my name is not associated with it for reasons I don’t understand. There was one point where the director went to another composer without letting me know – maybe that’s the reason. But later on, Keith Alan Morris hired me to write the soundtrack for “Runaway Hearts”, which I was happy to do. There are quite a few tracks from the movie that have never seen the light of day! Let me know if you’re interested in licensing any of them.