MUSIC+SOUND AWARDS 2021
BEST ORIGINAL COMPOSITION IN A FEATURE FILM
BEST ORIGINAL COMPOSITION IN A FEATURE FILM SCORE
The Reason I Jump
Entrant + Composer: Nainita Desai at Soundology, London
Director: Jerry Rothwell
Based on the bestselling book by Naoki Higashida, THE REASON I JUMP is an immersive cinematic exploration of neurodiversity through the experiences of nonspeaking autistic people from around the world. The film blends Higashida’s revelatory descriptions of his autism, written when he was just 13, with intimate portraits of five remarkable young people. It opens a window into an intense and overwhelming, but often joyful, sensory universe, a rich tapestry that leads us to Naoki’s core message: not being able to speak does not mean there is nothing to say.
Multi award-winning composer, Nainita Desai, tells us a little about her experience on the feature…
“Like the book upon which the film is based, the score opens a door to a constellation of divergent ways of experiencing reality. The aim was to evoke the intense sensory worlds of the book using score and sound design.
I hope that the audience experiences an array of intensity, richness, and beauty within the interwoven soundscape.
I started work during the shoot and wrote a lot of material based on the key ideas in the book without seeing the film, which was a very liberating process. Bringing in musicians throughout the year of production, I also held semi-improvised recording sessions which then helped inform the music writing process.
Having written many musical ideas, the director and editor temped the edit with my musical experiments. We wanted to blur the lines between music and sound design to create a cinematic immersive aural experience mixed in Atmos 360. The music and sound design had to interweave and work hand in hand, illustrating and amplifying what it actually felt like to be autistic for the contributors in the film.
Autists perceive the world in a different way. So the challenge was to create an aural landscape that felt cohesive and worked harmoniously – this process resulted in a very experimental journey. Over the course of the year we debated and experimented with various approaches culminating in a Dolby Atmos dub where occasionally we shaped and constructed musical cues from the music stems such as the forest cue talking about Nazi experiments during WW2.
The sound palette consists of manipulated found sound taken from the film’s location sound, vocals, strings and other organic and treated elements such as the ‘Halo’ (a hand pan), prepared clarinet and saxophone. All the sounds are created from organic sources – treating and manipulating sounds, working in tandem with the sound designer.
I also wanted authenticity towards Autism and Neurodiversity. Elisabeth Wiklander, cellist with the LPO is autistic and a cultural ambassador for the National Autistic Society and her contribution has great sensitivity and perception particularly in the Forest sequence.
So for example, in the scene where artist Amrit rocks to the movement of ceiling and table fans, the sounds of the fans and other percussive found sound elements from the location create a rhythmic foundation out of which grew a musical piece. Where the book describes the calm created by repetitive movement, I created oscillations and repetition in the score to evoke the sense of cathartic release.
Elsewhere, treated vocals represent the non-verbal world of the characters. For example, Naoki’s phrase, ‘We are outside the flow of time’, is broken up into its vowels and consonants, sung in a fractured way, as the boy journeys through a remote landscape.
We wanted to have a distinction between the musical worlds of the different characters, using different instrumentation. Jestina’s sound is the playful Halo Handpan, the cello worked for Joss and Ben and Emma share the double bass and guitar between them.
The challenge was to create an aural landscape that felt cohesive and worked harmoniously – this process resulted in a very experimental journey, sometimes constructing sparse musical cues from the music stems in the original compositions.”
Nainita’s website: www.nainitadesai.com
Learn more about the film: www.thereasonijumpfilm.com
