Still from Steven Bruno & Dziko Kazembe’s short thriller: ‘Innocent Victims’ (2025)
François Evans produced a score for Steven Bruno and Dziko Kazembe’s gritty short thriller: Innocent Victims. (Co-produced by Michael Shaw.)
Synopsis: fleeing her abusive, addicted boyfriend, Tracey falls into the arms of Maureen. Soon, Maureen begins her own mistreatment. Can Tracey escape?
It’s shot lo-fi on black and white Hi-8 video tape. François says…
Brief
Dziko had asked for something suspenseful, melodic, spiritual, simple, emotive, stylish and ‘classical’, with tension. I was keen to match the grittiness and coldness of this film with a chilly, ‘clinical’ sound, to highlight the absence of warmth in the blinkered characters.
Notes
Inspired by Elisabeth Lutyens‘s work, I opted for a 12-note approach, literally rolling a 12-sided die until I got 12, random notes. Here they are:
F#, E, A, G#, Bb, D, Eb, C, G, F, B, C#
Playing the row, I identified ‘segments that spoke emotion’ and wrote these out onto manuscript paper.
Next, I generated standard pitch matrices. These transpose the row by the distances between its notes. This makes a 12 x 12 note grid, which I also wrote out backwards, upside-down and upside-down-backwards (as 12-note music tradition dictates):
The Innocent Victims Pitch Matrices
The nice thing about pitch matrices is that they lay out and present logical patterns based on the first row, ready to be used.
A temporary piece of music used in the film’s main title, held a C# drone. I thought this was effective and so highlighted the C#s in the pitch matrices. Spookily 
, that note also appears diagonally in the upside-down and mirror image matrices.
I wrote out some of these patterns onto manuscript paper and played them at the piano. Each could be interpreted to evoke certains moods. Many of these cells are derived from designs which emerge from notes around the highlighted C#s.
The score abounds in repeated rhythmic patterns. The matrices show changing figures of notes with different numbers of pitches grouped together. I turned these simple number motifs into rhythms which recur in the soundtrack.
Instruments
There was little time to complete the score, so I opted for a simple set-up: two drum machines, two marimbas, four synths and two stringed instruments. Temp. music used featured a bass guitar, electronic drones and drum beats. Trawling through my sound libraries and instruments, I shortlisted:
Electro-Harmonix DRM 32 drum machine
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Cheetah MD-16 drum machine
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Two marimbas
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Green Oak Crystal soft synthesizer (plugin software) – five of these were used!
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Korg PS-3300 synthesizer
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Maplin 5600s synthesizer
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Moog The Rogue synthesizer
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…and some acoustic sources:
‘Cello ↑
Contrabass ↑
Making the Score
The synthesizers were programmed to produce sounds that changed colour slowly, as their notes were held. With the ‘The Rogue’ synthesizer, this can be done by careful detuning of its two oscillators against each other. I found it interesting combining these different sources of animated sound, because together, the rhythm of the colour changes generated polyrhythms.
The patch which the Crystal soft synth plays, has a gloriously slow attack, which means that it takes a long time for its sound to appear tangibly after keys have been played. This made it difficult to synchronize the Crystal synth’s sound to picture. I worked out how long it took for the sound to appear, and then shifted the start time of the key strokes earlier, so that the sound manifested where it was needed. Another feature of this patch, is that pitched sounds would appear from more textual ones over time. Knowing that this would happen, I had fun starting this synth’s sound super early, knowing that a needed note’s sound would pop out from nowhere, exactly when needed, later in the music cue.
Sometimes I thought that multi-tracked sounds from the Crystal synth would work well. It has a very clear, thin sound. As the plugin is monophonic (plays only one sound at a time), I had to call up five of these synthesizers to layer them in the mix, as ‘soprano 1’, ‘soprano 2’, ‘alto’, ‘tenor’ and ‘bass’.
The analogue synthesizers offer portamento (pitch sliding) effects. I brought these in at certain moments in the film to produce hair-raising effects.
The Cheetah drum machine includes tabla samples. I had fun programming ‘complex but not complicated’ rhythms with these, that turn over through time.
The ‘cello and contrabass always work together, with a dialogue rolling between them; same for the two Marimbas whose patterns interplay.
Result
It’s strange how a film score takes on a life of its own after you breathe care and energy into it.
The producer Dziko Kazembe said:
When I met you, you of all people, seemed the most clued up about films, […] So I had an intuition that as a composer I could just stand back and let you do what you do. I wasn’t wrong.
Really, really loving this […] instrumentals are wild! […] the soundtrack is really going to bring the film to life […] so powerful […] love the music […] Thematic as well […] consistent to its theme […] Good job!
Release
After mastering, this short film score will be released as an EP from lamprecordings.com for you to hear! 
