Marvel Universe Live Composer Michael Picton Discusses What It's Like Creating Music For Superheroes

Robin Burks, Tech Times 16 April 2015, 12:04 pm

Marvel Universe Live composer Michael Picton is no stranger to composing music for superheroes or for live arena shows. His resume includes scores for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Baily circus, as well as the Syfy television series Flash Gordon. He even has experience with film and was the 2004 grand prize winner of the Turner Classic Movies Young Film Composers Competition, which meant that TCM chose him to score the 1926 Greta Garbo silent film The Temptress.

Now, Picton is combining his talents to compose for something even more epic: Marvel Universe Live, a live action arena show that is currently touring the U.S. This live show features all your favorite Marvel characters as they act through a story that centers on the Cosmic Cube, a powerful item that Thor split into pieces to keep it out of the hands of bad guys. Of course, that means Loki must have the Cube, so it's up to Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Wolverine and a bevy of other superheroes to keep it out of Loki's hands.

But of course, Loki isn't the only villain after the all-powerful Cube. The superheroes also must take on Green Goblin, the Red Skull, Doctor Octopus, Electro and Madame Hydra.

To see when Marvel Universe Live reaches your city, please visit the show's official website.

So how does one go about scoring such a huge live event? We talked with Picton about his process in tackling the score for Marvel Universe Live.

You've scored for television, film and many other live shows. How is each medium different for you when you approach it?

Every live show can be different, every television show can be different, and some are more different than others. The live show is different a little bit from television in that you have to look at the space in which it's played. In the case of the Marvel show and the Ringling Brothers shows that I've done in the past, they take place in these huge arenas, so that gives it more of the feel of a big concert or sports event than something in a more controlled environment.

There's the nature of that large space that can contain sometimes as much as 10,000 people, which means you're creating a soundtrack to attract the audience's attention. It's a different thing than the intimate confines of watching a television screen in your home. You have to be a little more outgoing in the music. You have to work a bit with the music to bring the audience's attention to the center of the action in a big arena show, where with television, sometimes you can act on a more separate level when you're dealing with close-ups. In the arena, you sort of delineate the action with much broader strokes.

When you sit down to compose music for a new project, such as Marvel Universe live, where do you start?

I started with Marvel in two places. First, the history itself. Not all stories work like this, but with Marvel, you're taking part in a story that has decades of chapters already written. So from that standpoint, you have to come up to speed to understand where the show is in the history of the Marvel universe and the history of the portrayal of the characters, both in different incarnations, whether it be in comic books or TV series or movies. It's getting up to speed on how these characters feel in their current incarnations in the Marvel universe.

And then from the show itself, I start with the script. When I came onboard the show, there was a pretty close to final draft of the script already written. So, in terms of the specifics of the show, I could sit down with the script and sort of imagine the action in my head and how I would score that. Essentially, that's how we worked right up until right before the show opening.

It was only maybe a couple of months before we opened the show before we actually had stuff onstage to work with and respond to. And they were working with music that I had already started to write before they got onstage. And those who were actually in the process of working with the show, we did recordings of the dialogue tracks, too, and once I started working with the dialogue tracks, I was working with something much more concrete in terms of how the show would be timed and how the characters felt and the pacing of the whole thing.

Did the music from the Marvel TV shows or films affect the way you approached the live show?

A bit. Only in the sense that I didn't want to go too far afield from the current Marvel aesthetic, which is pretty solid and moving towards a nicer hybrid of classic superhero orchestral sounds and modern electronic and rock elements. We wanted to push this show a bit more into the electronic and rock here partly because of it being an arena show. But it still had to feel like a part of the Marvel universe. So I just tried to absorb the feel of the last few years of the movies to understand sonically where we were.

But on the same token, we specifically didn't want to reference any of the existing Marvel themes with the concept that Marvel Universe Live would be its own independent unique experience and feel.

What challenges did you come across or face as you worked on Marvel Universe Live?

The challenges were sometimes in creating the right balance of elements. Because we did want to push it a little harder in terms of the use of technical and other electronic elements and rock, and creating that balance where all those various genres and sounds feel like they're all part of one story and one score. The challenge was in mixing all those ingredients in a way that sounds good.

How much music did you compose for the show?

The show is wall to wall music, pretty much, and it's 100 minutes long, so it's 100 minutes of music.

Will the soundtrack of Marvel Universe live be available for purchase?

Hopefully, but we don't have any concrete plans on that yet.

Who inspires you musically?

I take inspiration from different areas, depending on what I'm working on, but my original soundtrack heroes were people like John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman. And in the pop realms, artists like Peter Gabriel, Nine Inch Nails, that kind of stuff. And more recently, I really love the scores of Thomas Newman, to name one.