PENDLETON, Ore. — In a photo taken shortly after his birth, Chris Thomas sports a miniature bow tie and waves a baby-size conductor’s baton. At the time, no one realized how accurate this portrayal of Thomas, done in jest by his musical dad, would become.
Since his graduation from Pendleton High School in 2001, Thomas has scored big in Hollywood as a film orchestrator. Last year, he became the youngest nominee for Best Orchestrator by the Academy of Film and TV Music Awards. He created music for hit television shows such as “Lost” and “CSI.”
Thomas also composed music for the winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Captain Abu Raed,” not yet released in the United States.
Thomas admits his musical tastes ran to the geeky as a young boy.
“I felt like I was the only kid who listened to Bach and Vivaldi all the time,” Thomas said. “I was really ashamed of it at first.”
Thomas always knew he wanted to compose music, but it bothered him that his favorite composers were all dead. Then, he found “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” by Tim Burton. Thomas popped it into his player and listened with fascination.
“I was listening to the music I always wanted to write,” he said. “It was like, ‘Wow, there’s a market for this — I can be a composer.’”
Thomas’ dad, Randy, remembers a trip to a Portland music store to buy music for Randy’s church choir. While Randy browsed choral music, his 12-year-old son disappeared downstairs into the instrumental section.
“He came running upstairs with a fully-scored version of Beethoven’s symphonies,” Randy said. “He’d come to the realization that a symphony has all those notes.”
Later, the boy returned with a blank book of score and asked his dad to buy it for him. Soon, Chris had transferred some of the music running around in his head onto paper.
Shortly after he purchased a synthesizer and sequencer, Randy was amazed to come home one night to find Chris had composed 10 minutes of music, using 16 different computerized instruments.
“He’d been telling me he’d been hearing this music in his head,” Randy said. “I just thought it was a kid talking.”
Chris focused on movies.
“When he goes to a movie,” Randy said, “he watches the music.”
Chris’s piano teacher, Sue Nelson, remembers the boy describing what he saw in his brain.
“It was like he had movies in his mind,” she said. “He had fully-developed scripts in his mind and the music to go with them.”
“Music has the ability to suggest things you can’t see,” Chris said. “We can tell you what’s really about to happen or we can do the complete opposite and completely mislead people.”
The process of scoring a movie takes long, exhausting hours. When the film is finally “locked,” a time code is stamped onto the footage. Chris watches the film wall-to-wall with the director and production crew and maps out the movie musically.
Thomas loads the movie into his computer, along with a full orchestra of sounds. Then the fun begins.
His prime composing hours are between 2 p.m. and 2 a.m., he said. He credits his wife Brigitte for making sure he eats and exercises.
For some productions, such as “Lost” and “Spider-man 3,” Thomas served as something of a “musical paramedic” — a composer who swoops in and saves the day when the show’s primary composer is overbooked and can’t finish the job.
Though he’s found success — three of Chris’ projects are on the ballot as possible nominations for 2008 film music awards — he said he just loves what he does. He modestly credited people who guided his way.
Besides his parents, Randy and Connie, he mentioned his high school choral director and Nelson, who made him learn to read music.
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