Pony Boys premieres at the Independent Film Festival of Boston April 30th

“In 1967 two young boys and their beloved pony took off on a monthlong adventure that brought them fame, fun and a wealth of great stories. Tony Whittemore, 11 at the time, and his brother Jeff, 9, drove a pony cart from their home in Needham to the Montreal World’s Fair.

Their story has now been made into a documentary called “Pony Boys,” directed by Arlington filmmaker Eric Stange, with music by John Kusiak, also from Arlington. The movie will have its premiere on Saturday, April 30, at the Independent Film Festival of Boston at the Somerville Theater.”

Read more at yourarlington.com.

“Pony Boys” shows again Sunday, May 1, at 6:15 p.m., also at the Somerville Theater. Check it out!

TICKETS

Introducing the Kusiak Music Library

If you follow Kusiak Music on any social media platforms, you may have seen some fun short videos in the past few months and wondered what they were all about. These were created using tracks from our Kusiak Music Library albums with some sample video clips to give you a sense of each album.

Kusiak Music Library is a newly-public boutique production music library featuring music composed by John Kusiak and several collaborators, including P. Andrew Willis, Kenny Kusiak, Billy Novick, Robert Van, Rob Jaret, and Caleb Sampson. Recently, music from the library has been used in Netflix's Tiger King, NPR's This American Life, and PBS' Poetry In America series, among others. Current projects in progress include Eric Stange’s Pony Boys and the third season of Poetry in America, which we are looking forward to sharing with you all.

Filmmakers, editors, music supervisors—do you have a film, TV series, commercial, or podcast in production that needs a score? We’d love to work with you and can customize existing tracks to suit your needs. Browse all albums—over 1,500 tracks—on the Kusiak Music Library website or get in touch directly if you’d like help with a search from one of our librarians.

To catch up on album videos you may have missed, hop on over to your favorite channel:

• The new KML Instagram feed

• The new KML Twitter feed

• John Kusiak’s YouTube Channel

• Kusiak Music’s Facebook Page

Film Showing: Rosamond Purcell Documentary At Boston's ICA 2/4

An Art That Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell

Sunday, February 4, 2018

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One of our favorite recent scoring projects, the Rosamond Purcell documentary, is showing for the first time locally (it premiered at the Film Forum in NYC and has been screening around the country). Museum admission at the ICA gets you a ticket, so make a day of it.

From the Institute for Contemporary Art calendar:

Finding unexpected beauty in the discarded and decayed, photographer Rosamond Purcell has developed a body of work that has garnered international acclaim, graced the pages of National Geographic and over 20 published books. An Art That Nature Makes details Purcell’s fascination with the natural world – from a mastodon tooth to a hydrocephalic skull – offering insight into her unique way of recontextualizing objects both ordinary and strange into sometimes disturbing but always breathtaking imagery.

Artist Rosamond Purcell will be in attendance and take questions after the screening.

TBT: Have You Seen Andy? (2008)

Have You Seen Andy?

HBO

Buy on Amazon

Have You Seen Andy? (HBO)

This 2008 Emmy Award Winner ("Best Investigative Journalism") tackles the mysterious abduction of ten-year-old Andy Puglisi in the summer of 1976.

Filmmaker Melanie Perkins searches for answers. 

"With special access and a unique perspective, Melanie Perkins, Andy's childhood friend, re-examines the day of his disappearance 30 years ago, reviews the police investigation and uncovers new and startling information, prompting the long-"cold" case to be reactivated. Through interviews with other kids from the neighborhood, Andy's family, local and state police officers and new forensic experts, Perkins begins to put the pieces of the puzzle together, ultimately focusing in on the suspects in the case, who were never charged at the time." (from Amazon.com)

John Kusiak composed the score for this HBO feature-length documentary. The Boston Globe's Leslie Brokaw stopped by the Kusiak Music studio in 2006 to observe the scoring process and discuss the challenges and rewards of composing film music with Melanie and John.

Boston Globe article from 2006 about the Kusiak Music composing process. 

Flashback Friday: Refuge Media Project

Because John has been writing music for several decades now, not every Kusiak Music client needs to request new pieces of music to complete their project. Often, smaller projects with limited budgets and/or time reach out to ask for some licensing options from the back catalog.

Here's an example – the Refuge Media Project documentary from 2013.

“More than one million refugees have come to the US, fleeing torture and political violence,” begins Refuge: Caring for Survivors of Torture.

The vast numbers are staggering, but what makes a greater impression in this stand-out documentary are the small, individual stories from survivors and those who offer them care and support as they resettle in the US.

Ben Achtenberg, project director at the Refuge Media Project and producer/director of Refuge, says the film – seven years in the making – came about as his general interest in healthcare and mental health issues drew him to organisations and healthcare providers that offer support to survivors in the US. Previously, he was nominated for an Oscar for the film Code Gray: Ethical Dilemmas in Nursing, which he produced and served as cinematographer."  (from WorldWithoutTorture.org, October 2013)

Let us know if you'd like an invitation to browse through the Kusiak Music Library (over 1,400 tracks and growing). 

Studio session at Kusiak Music for "Project Israel"

This session was for a film called "Touchdown Israel” that Rob Jaret scored. (Andrew Willis engineered the session and John Kusiak assisted.)

Beth Cohen, violin

Beth Cohen, cello

Billy Novick, clarinet

Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive (score by Kusiak Music)

POE: BURIED ALIVE is complete! This film explores not only the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, but also the character assassination that gave life to a lie.

John Kusiak, Andrew Willis, Kenny Kusiak and Rob Jaret all contributed to the film’s score.

Rosamond Purcell: An Art That Nature Makes (score by John Kusiak)

"Finding unexpected beauty in the discarded and decayed, photographer Rosamond Purcell has developed an oeuvre of work that has garnered international acclaim, graced the pages of National Geographic and over 20 published books, and has enlisted admirers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Errol Morris and Stephen Jay Gould. AN ART THAT NATURE MAKES details Purcell’s fascination with the natural world – from a mastodon tooth to a hydrocephalic skull – offering insight into her unique way of recontextualizing objects both ordinary and strange into sometimes disturbing but always breathtaking imagery."

Composers Attend Team Foxcatcher debut at TriBeCa Film Festival

Last week, John and Kenny Kusiak caught up with filmmaker Jon Greenhalgh at the Team Foxcatcher TriBeCa Film Festival premiere. If you've seen Foxcatcher (2014) with Steve Carell and Channing Tatum, this is the true story and even more poignant as it makes frequent use of home video footage from the Shultz family. John composed the score for this moving, well-attended documentary and says he tapped Kenny to compose additional music for "some of the more ambient sections." (Andrew Willis also assisted with with additional music and Rob Jaret helped with orchestration and score preparation.)

During and after the Monday and Tuesday screenings, the Kusiak Music group got to meet Nancy Schultz (wife of slain wrestler and the documentary's focus, Dave Shultz) and other people interviewed for this absorbing film. At one of the after parties we met Bill Ordine, a reporter on the scene who wrote "Fatal Match," a true crime novel about the events. We also had an interesting conversation with Joe McGettigan, the prosecutor in the DuPont trial. Aside from the fun of the film festival scene, the further details and context we got from these conversations was a special treat. All the questions raised from the film about professional sports, propaganda, and wealthy privilege were passionately discussed.

Working with Jon Greenhalgh was a great pleasure and Ben Cotner of Netflix did an amazing job in producing the film. It was great to see so much interest in the film: all four screenings were sold out!

Team Foxcatcher makes its Netflix debut on April 29th. Highly recommended by all of us at Kusiak Music!

Some horror movie news for Halloween...

The Rasmussen brothers got interviewed by Filmmaker Magazine recently and talked a bit about working with Kusiak Music. Read the entire interview here.

“Filmmaker: What did you do for music?

Shawn: We worked with the same team that we did on Dark Feed, John Kusiak and Andrew Willis. They are fabulous to work with. This was a little bit different in that on Dark Feed we hadn’t put a lot of thought into what kind of music we wanted on the film. We let John and Andrew come at it completely fresh, and we were ecstatic with what they came up with. This time around it was a little bit different in that we had something that we were really looking for in terms of tone.

Michael: We were definitely trying to emulate some of the older ghost stories that we had seen growing up in the ’70s; The Changeling and Burnt Offerings. They all had very distinctive scores – at least as I remembered them – and we really wanted to get that, so we kept going back to them and trying to get it just how we wanted it.

Shawn: We’ve been checking out a bunch of the reviews and there’s been a lot of discussion about how great the sound design and the score are. What was nice was that John Kusiak’s son Kenny Kusiak did the sound design with Andrew, so it was a joint effort to create a sound design. There’s a lot of mixing of sounds and music on both sides.

Michael: There was good synergy there, where there are normally two distinct people, so sometimes the score would go into the room tone and then come out and it was really much more organic.”

— Filmmaker Magazine, 10/22/15