Featuring Original Music By Darren Fung
Varèse Sarabande will release THE GREAT HUMAN ODYSSEY – Original Television Soundtrack, digitally on March 17 and on CD April 28, 2015. The film features original music by Darren Fung (LOST YEARS).
“When Niobe Thompson [Director] first approached me about composing the score for THE GREAT HUMAN ODYSSEY, I have to admit, I was skeptical,” said Fung. “But when he showed me some of the rushes from his shoots in Siberia, my jaw hit the ground. Niobe’s passion for sharing science is contagious, and it leaves the bigger question, how do you score a science documentary? Luckily, Niobe is equally passionate about telling a great story. I soon understood — they needed a score that would match the grandeur of the picture.”
Darren Fung is a Canadian composer, currently residing in Los Angeles. A graduate of McGill University, Darren recreated Canada’s second national anthem, the beloved Hockey Theme, for CTV and TSN. His work on Bell Canada’s Orchestra spot, run during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, was voted as Canada’s top commercial by readers of The Globe and Mail. His critically acclaimed work on the mini-series Lost Years garnered him a 2012 Canadian Screen Award nomination. His feature and short film scores have been heard at prestigious film festivals around the world, including Toronto, Cannes, and Sundance. Darren currently serves as the Second Vice President of the Screen Composers Guild of Canada, and acts as a Program Advisor for the Canadian Film Centre’s Slaight Music Residency.
Three-part documentary series and interactive web documentary THE GREAT HUMAN ODYSSEY explores the unlikely survival and the miraculous emergence of Homo sapiens as the world’s only global species. Ancient climate research has revealed that we evolved during the most volatile era since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Just like the many other kinds of human who once shared our world, we should have died away. Instead, our species survived to populate every corner of the planet, against all the odds.
Over 18 months of filming, Niobe followed in the footsteps of our ancestors across locations on five continents, working with 22 Canadian, American and South African cinematographers, including aerials, underwater, and ultra-slow motion specialists. Equipped with the next generation of ultraHD 4K cameras, film crews worked in some of the most hostile environments on Earth, including Arctic Siberia, remote South Pacific islands, tropical rainforests and African deserts.
On Papua New Guinea’s Sepik River, Niobe witnessed the extremely rare skin cutting initiation of the Crocodile People. His crew was the first in film history to visit the Badjao – the world’s last breath-hold diving nomads – in their war-torn homeland in the southern Philippines. In Russia, they filmed over the course of a full year in a closed border zone on the Bering Strait, eventually succeeding in their goal of capturing a traditional Inuit nest raid on 200-meter high sea cliffs. At the same time, their cameras had privileged access to one of the world’s leading ancient DNA laboratories, where research on early human remains is explaining the mysteries of our survival, including the enigma of our ancestral interbreeding with Neanderthals.
“This story, our story, of how humans as a species have miraculously adapted and persevered is fascinating,” Fung explained. “The drama, the wonderment, the adversity, and the triumph — these are the emotions I’ve tried to evoke in our score. It’s any composer’s dream to have not only the remarkable resources we had to realize the score, but to have the support, talent and friendship of a director and producer like Niobe.”
The Canadian Broadcasting Company presents THE GREAT HUMAN ODYSSEY, which aired in Canada in February, and is viewable on the internet here:http://www.cbc.ca/greathumanodyssey/episodes/. THE GREAT HUMAN ODYSSEY – Original Television Soundtrack on Varèse Sarabande, will be available digitally on March 17 and on CD April 28, 2015.
TRAILER: THE GREAT HUMAN ODYSSEY from Human Odyssey on Vimeo.
