God's Composer

When a movie is made, the final piece in the final edit is to create the score (background music). In essence the score helps meld the pieces together and helps shape the soul of the film.

As we were approaching the end of our edit for Seven Days in Utopia, our composer, who had been signed, sealed, and delivered, backed out because of a conflict with a bigger more important movie. Instead of panic, our Director of Marketing (DM) said that he had a favor to call in with another composer. Before serving on our film, our DM had helped make Pirates of the Caribbean and Gladiator. The award winning scores on both of these movies were composed by Klaus Badelt; arguably one of the greatest and hottest composers in the movie industry. He also composed the music for the closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. This was whom our DM had in mind!

There was another issue brewing as well. During the writing of the cemetery scene a song continued to come to mind. I felt like the song, Born Again by Third Day would convey the thoughts and emotions of the moment.

Sometimes when you hear a song, see a painting, or read a book you can sense an anointing upon the work. This song was anointed. Because of its anointing we felt that it would help penetrate the souls of hurting people during this defining moment in the movie. And as an amazing sign from God, Mac Powell, the artist who sings the song for Third Day, and his family showed up at a family camp with my family a few months after we decided upon using this song.

A few weeks before we went to edit, Born Again was opposed by a faction within the film making leadership team. The group opposing it won the argument and chose another song. I felt like the soul of the movie had just been given away. It hurt.

But God - don’t you like how that sounds. But God had His plan and purpose. Through a series of events that only God could have orchestrated I was able to reinsert Born Again during the edit phase of the movie.

We handed off the movie to Klaus. Soon after he watched the movie, I received an unexpected call from him. This is what he said. “You have a beautiful movie here. I was moved by the story. Tell me about the song in the cemetery scene. If possible, I want to build the entire score off of that song. That song is the soul of this movie.”

And that is just what he did.

I am in awe. But God…