Composer Jon H. Orten's blog

My Name is Ida - trailer

2010-12-14T07:04:00.000-08:00

Ben Woodiwiss' "My Name is Ida", which I scored, now has a trailer online:

Blood+Roses screening at Cornwall Film Festival!

2010-10-04T07:04:00.000-07:00

The first feature film I scored, Simon Aitken's "Blood+Roses", is being screened at Cornwall Film Festival in November.

Blood + Roses at Cornwall Film Festival
Friday, November 5 at 10:00pm
Location: Phoenix Cinema

Check out the "Blood+Roses" trailer here:

Second trailer for "You Look and You Think"

2010-10-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

There is now a second trailer for Ben Woodiwiss' "You Look and You Think".

Check it out:

The Hypnotist to be screened at the Angel Moving Image Festival.

2010-09-27T02:35:00.000-07:00

Director Jonathon Crewe's "The Hypnotist", which I did the music for, is to be screened in the CANDID building 6.45pm, 1st October 2010.

Check it out!

Here is an extract from the film:

Blood+Roses US Premiere at Freak Show festival (Florida)

2010-09-20T06:05:00.000-07:00

UK director Simon Aitken's "Blood+Roses" was the first feature film I scored, back in 2009. The film is now set to have its US premiere at the Freak Show film festival in Orlando Florida, 8-10 October 2010!

120,000 horror fans attend this festival every year, and John Carpenter, Robert Englund, Danny Trejo and more celebrities will be there! I really wish I could go there to check it out!

Read all about it over at
freakshowfilmfest.com!

Review of "You Look and You Think" (Portobello Film Festival)

2010-09-14T04:37:00.000-07:00

Director and writer Ben Woodiwiss' "You Look and You Think", which I did the music for, was recently screened at the Portobello Film Festival in London. The below review was recently published:

The evening also provided some more, rather arty shorts. Ben Woodiwiss's You Look and You Think visually and poetically explores the relationship between the viewer and the characters shown on screen. The film's narrator offers a simple yet evocative dialogue which challenges the position of the viewer. The boundaries imposed by the cinema screen are interestingly explored, whilst reality is openly questioned and the idea of pretence is vital to the film; the narrator describes how she walks and in turn we see her walk and yet, as she describes, she, as an actress is in fact pretending to walk which, although obvious, was certainly intriguing.

http://www.cine-vue.com/2010/09/special-features-portobello-film.html

Kiss Fight Smoke trailer

2010-09-06T15:32:00.000-07:00

I recently completed a score for Ben Woodiwiss' short film 'Kiss Fight Smoke'. The film is Ben's second film in a trilogy he is doing, the first film of which was 'You Look and You Think'. 'Kiss Fight Smoke' features Norwegian voice work by the Norwegian actresses Viktoria Winge, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal and Julia Schacht.

Ben has put together a trailer for the short film:

The Hypnotist and The Joker screening at Portobello Film Festival

2010-08-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

Two short films I scored for director Jonathon Crewe a while back are now being screened at the Portobello Film Festival in London.

The Joker and The Hypnotist
6th September - Video Cafe @ Westbourne Studios Bar - 8pm

The Joker
8th September - Night of Comedy @ Inn on the Green - 8pm

The Joker and The Hypnotist
19th September - Programmer's Selection @ Westbourne Studios - 3pm

The full program for the festival can be downloaded from here:
http://www.portobellofilmfestival.com/2010/festival-programme-2010.pdf

Habeas Corpus teaser trailer

2010-08-27T01:19:00.000-07:00

Habeas Corpus is an upcoming Horror film anthology featuring five stories directed by five directord. I scored the teaser trailer, which was screened at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square (London), 26/08/2010 during Fright Fest.

Habeas Corpus - Teaser Trailer
Uploaded by dreadcentral. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Blood+Roses screening at the Portobello Film Festival (London)

2010-08-23T04:41:00.000-07:00

The first feature film I scored, director Simon Aitken's Blood+Roses from 2009, is being screened at the Portobello Film Festival in London. Admission is free!

04/09/10
PORTOBELLO FILM FESTIVAL
Westbourne Studios, 242 Acklam Road, London W10 5JJ
Free Admission, 3pm - 5pm

Event page:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=135341689842832&index=1

Working on a trailer and updated my PC

2010-07-28T01:42:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a couple of things at the moment.

First of all, I am scoring a film trailer. This is the second film trailer I'm scoring. I'm not going to reveal the title until the trailer has been screened. The interesting thing with this trailer is that they are filming it twice. The first time they filmed it was without the proper actors, just to experiment and plan for the real deal. That's the trailer I've been working on so far. They are filming it with the actors and everything after this, when they know exactly how they want it, and when they send me that version, I'll just have a little bit of time to finalise the score before it needs to be finished. More news on this later.

I've also updated my PC from a trusty old Quad Core (Q6600) to a significantly faster i7 processor based system with 6GB Ram. It is also a quad core, but has 8 threads, meaning it will appear as an 8-core PC to the operating system. So far I'm really happy with the upgrade.

For the future I am awaiting 2 short films. I've already done some preliminary scoring for these, although the final edits are not yet done.

Stay tuned!

"You Look and You Think" Trailer

2010-04-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

You can now see a trailer for "You Look and You Think", featuring Viktoria Winge (Cold Prey 1 & 2, Max Manus) and directed by Ben Woodiwiss (Blood+Roses), on IMDB:

http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi491324441/

The film has been entered into several film festials in UK and Norway.

Printing t-shirts, mugs and pens with my logo

2010-03-18T02:11:00.000-07:00

For some of my musical projects I've been ordering t-shirts, mugs, pens and keyrings with my logo on them, and I've been managing to get these things at ridiculously low prices, like around £3 for a t-shirt with print.

I do this thorugh Vistaprint. The trick is to order just at the specific times when they have sales and offers on. Often times you will get items for free and just pay postage. The trick is to get as many things as possible without the postage increasing much. For instance, I could get a free mug and pay £3.77 postage. I added a free t-shirt to my order and the postage did not increase at all. I added a pen to this order, and the postage icnreased to £3.80.

Anyway, if you sign up to Vistaprint through the below link I'll get a small discount off my next order.

http://www.vistaprint.co.uk/frfuk?frf=583433802741

The Hypnotist [Extract]

2010-02-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

Here is an extract from The Hypnotist, a short film I scored for director Jonathon Crewe.

The Joker [Extract]

2010-02-13T09:34:00.000-08:00

Here is a portion of The Joker, a short film I scored for director Jonathon Crewe.

Completing The Hypnotist for Cannes

2010-02-07T11:34:00.000-08:00

It is a great privilege to be able to work on a project for a prolonged period of time. I have had this privilege while scoring director Jon Crewe's experimental short film, 'The Hypnotist'. Quite often clients get me involved at a later stage of the production phase, but with 'The Hypnotist' I even got to read the manuscript before any footage was ready. At the moment of writing I feel this is by far my most mature soundtrack to date, and I am very excited to see the response the film will get.

The Hypnotist is being entered into 'Cannes Cinefondacion'.

Cinema Bloody Cinema

2010-02-05T06:28:00.000-08:00

I scored director Jon Crewe's contribution for Reed.co.uk's short film contest, 'Cinema Bloody Cinema'. It was a very short term project, and I think the entire film was completed in about one and a half weeks. Jon Crewe is a very productive director, and since I started working with him late 2009, this is the 3rd project I score for him.

I think the project came well together, generally speaking. I'm not personally that satisfied with my music. As I was working on it, the film was cut shorter and shorter, and I had to do a lot of last minute transitions between various pieces of music that I'm not that happy about. I learn from all the projects I work on, though, and I think there are some quite nice moments in there.

If you see an offer, don't hesitate

2010-02-04T15:42:00.001-08:00

At the beginning of the year, dB Audioware were offering their guitar amp simulator vst 'Flying Haggis' for $10 instead of the usual $99. It said "$10 for 2010".

I thought "Nice, I've got all year to evaluate this amp sim!" I was pretty tight on money and figured I'd give it a few months before I decided. It appears, if you see a good offer, you should make up your mind pretty fast if you want to go for it or not.

'Flying Haggis' is now $29 I just noticed. No way I'll get it for that amount of money, knowing I could have had it for $10.

I did enjoy playing around with the demo, but there were some limitations to the sound. I could get some pretty cool dirty clean sounds out of it, but didn't have time to evaluate if it would work out in a mix for me or not.

It's a shame the creator of 'Flying Haggis' didn't state when the offer would run out.

I guess I'll delete that demo and move on to the next amp sim... (speaking of which, there are some amazing free ones that I might get back to in this blog)

2009: An important year

2010-02-04T15:30:00.000-08:00

2009 was a big year for me personally. I scored my first feature film, director Simon Aitken's feature debut 'Blood+Roses'. This opened a lot of doors for me as I now had my name on imdb.com, which really helps garner respect in the field, and more importantly, I developed a network. I've written music for several projects put together by the script writer of 'Blood+Roses', Ben Woodiwiss, and he also put me in touch with Jonathon Crewe, who I have scored several short films for.

It was also a huge year for me in terms of equipment and ideology. I've invested in several highly acclaimed virtual instruments for composing, and have saved no money whatsoever all year. I decided to invest all the time and money I could into my music.

As a result I now own East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra, Symphonic Choirs, StormDrum2 and Ministry of Rock as well as Cakewalk Rapture, Dimension Pro and Steven Slate Drums 3.5 Platinum: a fine selection of sound sources for creating antyhing from cinematic symphonic pieces to electronic and rock based music. I invested a lot of money, but I now have some very powerful sounds at my fingertips.

2010 should be a very interesting year. At the start of 2009 I had none of these fantastic tools, but as I face the new year I am prepared...

The trailer for 'Blood+Roses', scored by me.