VPA Blog: 3 Companies Look Forward and Back
June 18, 2024
Infinity Post & VFX’s Gary Shaw, Core Music Agency’s Ari Wise, and Maverick Post’s Gregor Phillips reflect on the year that was, and share their plans for 2024
by Sabrina Rani Furming
There is an art to film scoring, and Core Music Agency’s company philosophy is to support the artists who practice this art, says Ari Wise, the agency’s founder and director. And in 2023, Core’s artists worked their magic on a whopping 181 productions. Although Wise describes the number as “a lot of projects,” he notes that Core wasn’t immune from the Hollywood strikes. “We had to hustle a little harder last year, and we did see a drop in business from 2022, but overall, we faired pretty well,” says Wise.
“It’s a testament to the hard work that our agents do, and it’s a bigger testament to the work that our composers do. We’re nothing without our talent. We’re nothing without our composers.”
These composers include Mark Korven (whose credits include The Lighthouse, The Witch, and Night Swim, the last of which opened in early January), Jesse Zubot, Red Heartbreaker, Graeme Coleman, Matthew Rogers, Terry Frewer, Wayne Lavallee, and dozens more. Their work is heard in a variety of projects, including features and short films, documentaries, television series, animated projects, video games, and more.
“We have a diverse roster [of composers] with different skills and backgrounds of expertise,” says Wise, who started the company 17 years ago after scoring projects for many years. “We don’t pigeon-hole composers.
Most of our composers are very good at doing many different kinds of things. Our goal is to make sure they keep seeing some kind of success. We work on a wide range of different things. I like to think that we have somebody for everybody.”
Core’s trajectory was set a few years ago, says Wise, and the agency’s goal for 2024 is to keep pushing that agenda along. “Our goal for 2024 is to continue to seek more challenging work for our composers,” says Wise. “We’re making bigger inroads into foreign markets and we want to push that more. That’s something we did in 2023, and we want to do more of that. We’re signing some international composers, some European composers, and some American composers. We are a Canadian company, and our mandate is to serve Canadian composers, and if I want to make some over-reaching goal statement, we want to make Canada a destination for scoring for the world. We want the world to come to Canada to score here.”
One characteristic that makes Canadian composers so appealing is the fact that they don’t stick to one distinctive style, says Wise. “If you look at Icelandic composers, they’re notorious for having a certain kind of style, and I don’t see that in Canada,” he says. “Canada has such a wide variety of people, and a practice of respecting different cultures. A lot of our composers have studied overseas, and they’re bringing that world knowledge back here, so you can get anything you want in Canada. There’s no Canadian style, but I do see a Canadian work ethic. I see a Canadian character that should be very appealing to the world in how hard we work, how we do things, how collaborative we are, and how much we respect the filmmaker and the process. That’s what I see from Canada in terms of a Canadian composer national identity. We’re humble. We’re collaborative workers. We’re not insane artists who demand attention.”
And one thing Wise is not worried about in 2024 is AI. “Every film festival I go to and every conference I go to, there’s always a panel on AI, and so far, every panel I’ve gone to has a part where they go, ’Here’s how AI scored this scene,’ and they use different AI platforms, and in every case, the audience erupts in laughter because it’s so ridiculously bad,” says Wise. “Everyone is worried about how AI will change the industry, and composers are maybe worried the most. But, in the end, we’re confident that if humans are still making movies, they’ll want humans to score them.”
ARI WISE ON THE VALUE OF THE VPA: “Composers who are moving here, they reach out to me, and I can’t represent everybody, but if I recognize talent and I can see that they’re highly qualified or they just have some sort of promise or spark, I say, The first thing you should do is join the Screen Composers Guild, and then join the VPA. That’s how you’re going to get to network, how you’re going to get to know the people who may bring you to the table. The bottom line is people don’t work with companies. People work with people, even if they’re working for companies, so you have to meet those people, and you have to like those people. You should like the people you work with, and the best way to do that is engaging in community activities and meeting them and talking to them and working with them, and the VPA provides that milieu. I can’t say enough good things about it.”