David Schweitzer

I’ve worked on so many projects over the last ten years that I can’t do a post for each of them, but thought it’d be good to have one page which included quite a few clips from a bunch of early projects. So…

This is a piece from an early collaboration with Jan Bauer while at the NFTS, called Hellbound. A surreal drama, in this scene an old man and a young girl dance in a deserted bar. The trumpet was played by my fellow-composer at the NFTS, the talented Mark Hartley. 

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This next piece of music I made entirely from vocal sounds I collected around film school, stretched, twisted and variously manipulated. It went with a lovely piece of animation by Jim le Fevre where hundreds of bobble-headed men wandered around in meaningless formations on an endless grid landscape.

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Here is the opening to the soundtrack to my first ever film. This was a musical collaboration with director Jesse Chambers, called Inside Out Man. It was – as with all Jesse’s projects – a bizarre film, but quite charming too, and it went on to win the award for Best Short Film at Manchester’s Kino Film Festival. We worked together later on the (sadly unfinished) feature musical, The First Internet Child and on the musical short, The Computer Virus.

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Next up is a title theme from a BBC2 science documentary series I worked on soon after leaving film school (thanks to Helen Foot for finding me that job!)

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A title sequence for a BBC3 animation pilot show called Cubby Couch, produced by Slinky.

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Here are a couple of pieces from Jonathan Levitt’s feature documentary, Sunny Intervals and Showers. Following the ups and downs of manic depressive Allan Levi, the film was nominated for the prestigious Grierson Award and has screened at festivals all over the world and also on the BBC. The first of these cues was on a definitely high in his cycle during a family barbecue. Mary Richards is on the violin, while I am on all the guitary and banjoish instruments and yee-haws.

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While this title song closes out the film….

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An NFTS collaboration with the lovely Jenni Linko, this was a film we co-directed about greyhound racing – I remember editing it on an old Steinbeck machine (which I loved actually… should have been an editor?). We filmed it at Catford Dog Track which sadly closed down a couple of years later. Anyway, I always thought this piece of music from the film had a lot of energy!

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At film school I scored Nicole Sochor’s film, Rachel & The Red Orchestra. It was a dramatised documentary based on the fascinating story of Rachel Gunzig, a resistance heroine and Communist spy. Rachel worked for the Red Orchestra, the WW2 spy network betrayed by West and East in the Cold War.

I remember being in tears shortly before the recording session for this film (just piano, cello and clarinet I think, so not exactly a full orchestra), not – I’m sorry to say – because of the film’s content or my beautiful music, but because I had taken on too many projects at once and was completely overwhelmed. At least that was good practice for the rest of my life!

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Here’s a cue from a documentary I worked with Jenni Linko on for Finnish Television. It was called You are the only one who knows, and was a intimate portrait of a teenage girl coming to terms with her homosexuality. Again, Mary Richards played the violin.

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Here are a couple of pieces from one of the first documentary series I worked on, back in 2002 (well, if two parts constitutes a series). Unsolved Murders (for Discovery Channel), presented by Anthony Scrivener QC did pretty much what it said on the tin… The clever barrister went back over old cases to see if he could come to any conclusions. Here’s an old Guardian article about the series, and here is the title theme for the series…

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And here is a cue from the film about the Peasenhall murder.

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On a completely different note, this is a track I wrote for a BBC tv ad for a kids radio show on Radio 4 called Go4it. I think perhaps the series is still running, but this was when it was first launched. Jim le Fevre directed the nice animation of a girl walking through a clockwork imaginary world (hence lots of clockwork-y sounds).

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A student ad made while at film school… a knight rises out of the swamp to battle a dragon, but then fumbles around for his instant camera… or something.

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Finally, this was another NFTS graduation project, the great animator Richard James’s film, Dick. A day in the life of the sneering Essex-boy Dick Turpin, he rejects his faithful horse Bess in favour of a huge stallion he steals, but finds his activities as a highwayman suffer because of his outsize steed. 

The score was all based on the theme song that comes in at the end of the film. I was really happy with it at the time, although it always sounded even more rough round the edges than I intended! I played this at a gig a few years back when I had quite a big backing band. It stood up pretty well.

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Anyway, hope you enjoyed listening to this random sampling of early projects. 

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