Sibelius Provides Mr. Bean’s Perfect Holiday Soundtrack

Score for worldwide smash comedy Mr. Bean’s Holiday written entirely in
Sibelius by renowned composer Howard Goodall

Music is an essential ingredient of any successful film, and it becomes even more vital when there is virtually no dialogue. That’s why the producers of Mr. Bean’s Holiday, follow up to 1997’s enormously successful Bean: The Movie, asked renowned TV composer, presenter and all-round ambassador for UK music education Howard Goodall to reprise his role as the film’s composer.

Howard wrote, perfected and prepared the entire score using music notation package Sibelius 4 – his composing tool of choice.  “Sibelius is the best thing to happen to composers since the invention of the propelling pencil" says Howard. ”It’s so quick, I just can’t imagine composing in any other way now.”

One of Howard’s highlights from the score comes towards the end of the film. Mr. Bean finds himself at the Cannes Film Festival, where he replaces pretentious art-house director Willem Dafoe's film with his own holiday video.  To accompany this scene, Howard wrote a "mini-soundtrack" for the art-house film and a sequence to fit Mr. Bean's video.  The orchestra recorded both sequences separately, and they then used Pro Tools – the audio production software from Sibelius’s sister company Digidesign – to meld them together, such that the soundtrack of the film gives way to the score. 

Howard was able to use 5.1 surround sound mixing in Pro Tools to place the soundtrack for the art-house film "in front of" the viewer, as if it's coming from the screen, while the cue to accompany Mr. Bean's videos emerges from "behind" the viewer, moving forwards via 5.1 sound to meet the soundtrack "at the screen".

Another highlight of Howard’s is the movie’s climactic scene, as Mr. Bean walks along the beach at Cannes.  For this, Howard wanted to combine the famous 1945 recording of Charles Trenet's "La Mer" (the song that would eventually become the basis of Bobby Darin's "Beyond The Sea") with an accompaniment from a modern orchestra.

To achieve this, he worked with his recording team to produce a click track that matched the variable tempo of the original song, whilst still sounding regular enough for the players to be able to play in unison.  Once they had the click exactly right, they were able to have the orchestra play along with the original recording, and the result is that when you watch the end of the film, the Trenet song suddenly swells with the sound of a massed modern orchestra, producing a climax of which Howard is very proud.

For more information about how Sibelius is used for Film and TV music visit www.sibelius.com/genres/TV.