Berklee student and Seven Swords composer Nadeem Majdalany aims for a prestigious film festival.

By Julie Pampinella
Berklee.edu Correspondent
April 11, 2007

From left, Nadeem Majdalany, Joe Moser, Vino Salame, Eric Ekman
Photo by Nick Balkin

In a way, the journey of The Seven Swords' young heroine parallels the story of the film's composer: An awesome challenge falls into the hands of a young college student, Nadeem Majdalany '06. In the quest to score a feature film in time to enter it into the Sundance Film Festival, he fiercely battles evil time constraints, a scary budget, dastardly technology glitches, unforgiving FedEx deadlines, and his last semester of Berklee classes.

With limited resources and experience, but lots of help from friends, Majdalany and cowriter Joe Moser '06 managed to pull off a feat of impressive proportions: 60 minutes of music, written, copied, bound, spotted, and recorded by a full orchestra in a matter of a few weeks.

The story begins early last year, when Florida-based filmmakers Vino Salame and Eric Ekman, whose previous short films have won acclaim at the Palm Beach Film Festival, embarked on a feature-length project in the hopes of meeting deadlines just months away. The project was written during the last months of 2005, with pre-production beginning in January 2006.

Salame and Majdalany met as teenagers in Palm Beach several years ago while the latter was vacationing from Canada with his family. The two remained friends and have combined their film and composing talents in a few short projects such as local television advertisements via Salame's production company, Visionary Age.

Salame handed Majdalany the opportunity to score The Seven Swords, his first feature-length film, with a catch—it had to be finished in less than three months. It was June 2006, and filming had only just begun. Salame gave Majdalany a scene to score: a dream sequence of the main character, Hana. Majdalany returned the finished product to Salame in just 12 hours. The filmmakers were impressed with Majdalany's turnaround time and musical interpretation of the scene. He was brought on board immediately.

Majdalany recruited friend Joe Moser, a film scoring/contemporary writing and production alumnus, to cowrite and assist on the production end. With ample experience supervising, coordinating, and producing film scoring sessions, and a strong background in electronic music, Moser was a natural choice to complement Majdalany's background in classical composition.

The composers took a day to choose their characters and themes, and mapped out their thematic elements. In spite of knowing it would be a daunting task in such a short time frame, the two pledged to record with a full orchestra.

"We really needed live players," says Salame. "Live original orchestrations give a heft to the film that is unexpected in a project of its kind." 

Soon the composers would learn that speed, organization, and production skills—and the ability to work under pressure—were their most valuable tools. It was hurricane season in Florida, and weather would cause numerous delays in the shooting schedule. They would not receive a final cut of the film for several weeks. Without any film to spot, the duo resorted to writing cues for short scenes in text with time code, relying heavily on their understanding of the story and the characters, their shared vision with the director, and a bit of blind faith.

"When they got to the spotting session, nearly everything in those scenes fit," codirector  Ekman marveled. "There were only a few minor changes, and Nadeem fixed them on the spot."

The spotting session was crammed into two days, 12 hours the first day and six hours on the second. The duo would have to finish the composition and electronic music production in only six days to turn the score over to the copyists by August 29—leaving only five days to have the score copied, bound, and printed for the recording session.

The two worked around the clock in Majdalany's apartment with several copyists and many friends on hand at all hours.

From left, Nadeem Majdalany and Joe Moser Photo by Nick Balkin

"We assigned friends to keep one of us awake an hour at a time throughout the day and night," says Majdalany. "They would come to my place just to wake us up. We asked them to let us sleep only an hour at a time in shifts. After a few days we kept the shades closed—we didn't want to be distracted by what was daytime and what was nighttime." 

In the rush to the finish, the group endured multiple obstacles including computer crashes, a big learning curve (Moser had three days to do the final sound mix and had never before mixed for the big screen), and missed FedEx deadlines (Salame and Majdalany booked last-minute flights and brought the actual computer hard drive with the film and score to Los Angeles to burn to DVD and hand-deliver to Sundance headquarters).

Although the film wasn't selected to be shown at Sundance (Salame acknowledges that it was a long shot), the film will be featured at this month's Palm Beach Film Festival, chalking up a victory for the team. What's next for the recently-graduated Majdalany?

Grad school is a possibility, with studies in conducting. Majdalany is also composing a series of jingles and commercials, and is working on his own material. But if he's asked, he's definitely on board for another collaboration.

"I love those guys—Vino [Salame] and I click completely. We both have the same vision and drive that will propel us to greatness. It sounds cocky, but I'm an idea man, I thrive on the moment, the desire and rush. I know I wouldn't be able to get where I want to go if I didn't have that."

Julie Pampinella is a music-publicist-turned-freelance-writer who lives in Shirley, Massachusetts, with her husband Paul, an assistant professor in Berklee's Voice Department, and her three-year-old daughter Olivia, who likes to sing very loud songs.