FILMMAKERS GLOBAL NETWORK :: Community Spotlight with Daniel Denk

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Daniel Denk

Czech Republic

Can you tell us about your body of work?

I am a music composer from Prague, Czech Republic. I started doing music about 10 years ago in a local band playing electric guitar, which I pretty much do until now. Throughout the years I started feeling that I would like to develop my musical skills further beyond the possibilities of a single instrument. I also had an amateur passion of film score composing, mainly work of Hans Zimmer spoke to me a lot.

I started to get in touch with Steinberg Cubase DAW and various virtual instrument libraries, and I completely fell for it. So today I compose as much as possible, because, as the wise Mr. Zimmer said, music tells a story, and since I really love storytelling and music, this is the right place for me to be.

What are your current projects?

Nowadays I am getting in touch with various filmmakers from my area trying to see what musical help might be done, but these are early stages to be honest so frankly there’s not much to be said at this point. I was recently also approached by an Argentinian music composer who already worked on an Academy Award winning film, so that is really a thrilling chance to be given for me. It is a very specific musical project which aims to create very specific pieces of music for very specific audience.

Can you describe your film scoring and/or music writing process?

I tried many different approaches throughout the time, but I found out that what fits best to me is the miraculous aspect of randomness. I came up with many of my ideas just travelling in public transportation and suddenly a melody came in my head. I kept developing it – and that is a point when I usually need to hide in some corner somewhere and sing the melody into my cell phone’s dictaphone, otherwise within next 10 minutes the melody is completely lost in my head. I just need to hear the main melody first, let it come to my head, and only then I develop this first idea further.

Can you share with us a “Challenge and Solution“?

I think that a big challenge to any composer is spend hours and hours developing a piece of music and in the end find out that it just is not good enough. To have the courage of deleting the whole thing and starting from scratch is a huge challenge, everyone sees the time invested in the effort – and deciding for a solution of recreating the whole piece is a hard one. But from my experience it is a solution that is worth it, because facing the truth and in the end creating something even better should be rewarding enough.

If you could share a tip or piece of advice with creatives around the world, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid of certain risk-taking. During my composing process I sometimes decided that I would just go for a radical solution that sometimes brought the correct solution – and sometimes it did not. I loved the motif itself, but it just wasn’t fitting with things that were happening on-screen. But I kept the motif itself finding out that in a little while I was able to use it again – and this time it did the trick. Go for the edges and do your best.

www.danieldenkmusic.com

 

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