Ramin Djawadi and Brandon Campbell have been hired to score the supernatural upcoming horror thriller Slender Man. The film is directed by Sylvain White (The Losers, Stomp the Yard) and stars Joey King, Julia Goldani-Telles, Jaz Sinclair, Annalise Basso and Javier Botet. The movie is based on based on the myth created by Eric Knudsen (aka Victor Surge) and revolves around a tall, thin figure with unnaturally long arms and a featureless face who stalks, abducts and traumatizes people. Brad Fischer (Shutter Island, Zodiac), James Vanderbilt (Truth, White House Down), William Sherak (Darkness Falls, The Messengers), Robyn Meisinger (First Snow) and Sarah Snow are producing the Screen Gems, Mythology Entertainment, Madhouse Entertainment and It Is No Dream Entertainment production. Slender Man is set to be released in theaters nationwide on May 18, 2018 by Sony Pictures.
Djawadi (Iron Man, Pacific Rim, Clash of the Titans) also has Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time directed by Ava DuVernay and the Amazon original series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan coming up. He also continues to score HBO’s Game of Thrones and Westworld. Campbell has previously composed additional music for several projects scored by Djawadi, including Warcraft, Person of Interest, The Great Wall and Prison Break. His solo scoring credits include 2016’s The Thinning starring Logan Paul & Peyton List.
Looked up this Brandon Campbell guy… clearly the guy writing all of Ramin’s music the last few years. Glad to see him finally catch a break!
Djawadi is actually one of the only contemporary composers whose assistants are actual “assistants” and not “ghostwriters”.
Hate to break it to you but that’s just not true
No need to break it to me, I have it on a good authority that it actually is true. Campbell didn’t even participate in the production of “Westworld”, “GoT 7”, or “The Mountain Between Us” just to name the most recent ones. In fact, there is no “additional music by” credit to be found at all on those scores.
It just became this annoying folklore of people screaming “ghostwriting” at anybody associated with Hans Zimmer, when the simple fact of the matter is that everybody gets always properly credited. Maybe not on the very cover of the CD, and sure, sometimes never, but those are extreme cases with a lot of complicated studio politics behind them (like Klaus Badelt being credited as the sole composer of the first Pirates, or Zimmer himself being nowhere to be found on the cover of the first Transformers, despite writing a ton for that one himself).
People need to learn to maneuvre in this – sometimes confusing – world of film scoring, read between the lines and accept the fact that even with the film composers there exists a concept of “name recognition”. Case in point: this “Slender Man” movie is quite obviously going to be Campbell solo project, with Djawadi being there on a consulting capacity and maybe providing a theme or two, yet mainly because he’s become a very recongizable name in the industry and it will greatly help his good friend and apprentice. That’s simply the way it is and there is no need to getting worked up about it too much.
Just because there is no additional music credit does not mean that Djawadi wrote everything on those shows. In fact, given what I know about the industry it would lead me to believe that it is actually more likely that there were ghostwriters on those shows — which is fine.
But if you think that because there’s no credited additional music on those shows then Ramin wrote it all, then I have a bridge to sell you. It’s possible, I’ll give you that, but more likely to me that it is due to not wanting to rock the boat on an important flagship show, and needing to maintain the illusion that everything is done by one composer.
The thing is, they were more than willing to give Brandon Campbell credit right until the sixth season of GoT, which is arguably the most famous show on the planet right now, and has been for several years at that point, so I don’t really think it’s about suddenly maintaining the show’s prestige.
I’m aware that Djawadi didn’t write every single note on GoT or his other scores; there were a lot of different guys helping him out: Bobby Tahouri, Dominic Lewis, Bryce Jacobs, but mainly it was Brandon Campbell as an “apprentice” of sorts. He’s now “left the nest”, as his sudden disappearance from multiple concurrent Djawadi projects would suggest. I never said he didn’t do any writing, I’m just adamant that he didn’t do a bulk of it, as someone would perhaps have you believe.
Where even is the logic in it? A composer takes on a high-profile project just to let his assistant do the writing? And the director and producers are OK with that? Does the composer himself snore coke from a hooker’s butt in the meantime, or what? 😀 This is what I think of every time someone blindly screams “ghostwriting”. Sometimes, assistant is just an assistant and “additional music” is just “additional music”, similar to second unit directors in the filmmaking process. Never seen anybody outraged by those. Why can’t we just be excited for their solo carreers and hope that they learned their best from the “teachers”?
Wow. This is seriously what Djawadi wants to do with his life? Wow
make money by doing his passion which is music?
I guess what liamdude is asking is “why would he choose such a low profile movie?” The answer is: to help out his friend Brandon, whose solo project this basically is.
I guess what liamdude is asking is “why would he choose such a low profile movie?” The answer is: to help out his friend Brandon, whose solo project this basically is.