In 2013, AXE Launched the AXE Apollo Space Academy, a global competition to send guys to space. The campaign idea ‘leave a man, come back a hero’ promised that when it comes to attracting girls, nothing beats an astronaut.

In this film, a heroic fireman rescues an attractive girl from a burning building. Once safe, the girl looks longingly into our hero’s eyes, but the moment is disrupted by an astronaut who appears from nowhere. The girl runs into his arms, whilst a call to action encourages guys to sign up online for a chance to go to space.

The music company was given the challenge of creating the epic sound of an action genre film score and telling this complex story in the space of sixty seconds or less. The first and most important step was to find the tone. There is a fine balance in conveying danger, romance and heroism with just the right amount of self-reference but without sounding ridiculous.

The composers wrote a wide array of different film scores ranging from subtle to overtly

bombastic. From contemporary to vintage “disaster movie”. The piece that made it managed

to tick all of the boxes.

The end result on Fireman is a hybrid of two or more pieces. That process is always interesting for us because each composer will bring their own personality to a piece. With a complex story like this, it allowed us to make the music take these wildly dramatic turns.

At the end of the day we had material from a composer in Boston, one from LA and one from NY. Because the demo tracks were sketched out using Logic Audio and various orchestral sample libraries we were able to get everything working harmoniously together and fit the edit - which was also evolving as we were working out the kinks in the music.

When everything was locked we layered choice live instruments over the midi tracks to get

that real richness and sweetness that the samples alone do not provide.

The last challenge was getting the music complimenting the very dense sound design. This

is usually done “in the mix” but we found that it was important to even consider the musical

arrangement in relation to the SFX. Making sure the celli and basses didn’t get lost in the

explosions and underwater scenes, for example.

The ending was the most fun to work on because we had created a score that had nearly

reached a “ten” towards the end. What do you do for an astronaut? We had to throw in the

kitchen sink, of course. The male choir.

Ultimately, what worked at the end was the score that was the most serious and most dark.