CHRIS P. BACON

Steven wrote
Wow, I thought that name was a joke. He's actually a real person!?

After graduating from USC's scoring program in 2005, composer Chris Bacon worked under prolific film composer James Newton Howard. His first major motion picture score was for 2008's CG-animated "Space Chimps," and he recently finished mixing the score for "Waking Sleeping Beauty," a documentary about the history of Disney's modern age of animation that will hit the fest circuit in the fall.

Directed by Don Hahn, the documentary outlines the studio's animation history from the mid-'70s through the mid-'90s. Because Disney is almost synonymous with animation, Bacon had to create a score around some very well-known and extremely catchy pre-existing material.

Those two decades of Disney animation feature the work of tunesmiths Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Elton John, causing Bacon's score to weave itself around clips of songs like "Be Our Guest" and "Hakuna Matata."

Bacon's approach to pre-existing music? Leave it alone.

"That music tells a different story," Bacon explains. "The music I was writing wasn't trying to be that music, it wasn't trying to surpass it or imitate it. My work needed to have its own voice in the movie, not be a part of a previously existing score."

He found composing around the film's dialogue more of a challenge.

"The film is mostly dialogue, so the story needed a motor in certain parts to move it along," says Bacon. "I started by writing motors and associating them with different players and time periods, trying not to be as dramatic with them as I would on an animated or narrative movie."

He admits it wasn't always an easy task. "The music had to support the dialogue, but also be out of the way enough that it wasn't competing for sonic space."

Having worked with Bacon on Disney's feature-length doc "Earth," Hahn knew exactly what the composer would bring to the table.

"Music is really everything to me," explains Hahn. "In terms of storytelling, I feel it's one of the biggest tools we have. And Chris writes emotions more than he writes music."