My Jurassic Park score started with a four note motif, a chromatic descent: C B Bb A. In my attempt to paint the investigative but slightly ominous mood of the start of the scene, I generated the crux of the entire score and used these four notes as the tonal centre and melodic basis. Throughout this score I took those four notes and: altered their order, varied their rhythms and durations, transposed them, creating many variations to keep a cohesive feel to the score.

My process was to initially score the whole scene with just the string quartet, using this primary idea of varying a four note motif to match the dynamic mood shifts. The first mood is ‘investigative’, with tension and anticipation, but I had to be sure not to lead the audience into pre-empting the shock and fear to come. Thus, I started with this descending chromatic motif that you can hear in the strings as the boy zooms in with his night vision goggles (0:38). It initially played at the earlier in the score (0:11), where the more playful ‘sculpture’ instrument was eventually made to play, as it was identified that the strings pre-empted the feeling of ‘dread’ too much and was displaced to the spot it is now. This woody/ glassy sound with the shorter rhythmic values better represents an investigative mood, paired with subtle piano chords who are concealed under the loud stomping sound effects, a more discreet foreshadowing of what is to come.

At 0:38, along with the string quartet, I added an oboe melody, representing an innocent investigation, contrasted with the timpani which simultaneously parallels the loud dinosaur stomps from before and thus foreshadows the dinosaur’s arrival.

The music entirely fades out at 0:50 as the girl asks, “Where’s the goat?”, the musical silence maintaining as the goat leg drops on the roof to avoid “mickey mousing”. Instead, dramatic music enters at 0:52 when the camera shows the girl and Dr. Grant’s shocked expressions, signalling the first mood shift from investigatory to shock. To represent the shock, the violin almost squeals at the highest pitch heard in the score thus far, the bass descending with dread. This transitions to the quartet playing a descending tremolo motif as the dinosaur is revealed painstakingly slowly, drawing out the fear of the moment which I further emphasised with a descending line cliché in the piano.

At 1:13 when the camera cuts back to Dr. Grant’s face, a deliberate silence is left to allow a moment of hyper-realism, emphasising his fear, and serving as the transition through to the next mood shift, ‘panic’. This panic is first represented in the music at the camera cut at 1:15, with a dynamic semiquaver and minimum motif, contrasting four fast notes with one longer one to convey confusion, with the texture and dynamics gradually increasing to convey a building panic.

This build climaxes at 1:22 when a staccato violin melody mirrors Dr. Grant’s running, continuing to mirror the panicked mood, as the score continues to do with these staccato rhythmic ideas until the build towards the next mood shift. This starts at 1:55 with an ensemble-wide crescendo which builds until it is contrasted with a sudden silence, allowing the monumentally horrifying dinosaur to dominate. As the music comes back in at 2:09, a new mood has begun, ‘primal horror’, the score ending with a deep dark piano and bass motif to convey a doomful sense of hopelessness paired with an ominous viola ostinato.