Will Gregory: new music on Real World X – Lost In The Forest

Director Eleanor Rhode showed Gregory early set designs, with plans to make the fairies exist as light sources or light beams; ethereal, neon and a bit disconnected… This visual approach gave Gregory “a kind-of carte blanche to think about using synths and electronic sounds. We were on a pathway to using synths and making some sounds that reflected this tingling, fleeting electricity.”

“I actually wrote a lot of the music completely independently with the thought that there’s going to be a certain forest-y mood, there’s going to be some songs, that’s about all I knew… plus the ethereal, neon, flickering effect for the fairies. I demo’d some of it and sent it on, I like to send the director music, and was then able to get feedback from Eleanor while I was writing, which was really helpful.”

“I’ve always liked music in theatre or film where the music is strong enough to stand on its own two legs. Some of the time you’re doing a mood that is very much in the background and, here, we’ve got dialogue… We’ve got Shakespeare! You don’t want to trample all over that, obviously.  It’s always great when you can get the music to run in parallel rather than completely underscoring what’s happening on stage. And sometimes Eleanor would put it somewhere I hadn’t imagined which was fantastic.”

“Also, as a composer, when you feel ‘I’m actually functional here’, I’m able to help the technical process of getting from one scene to another to happen, with a little interlude, that always makes me feel good…”