Review: Planet Earth III Suite - Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea, Sara Barone
- by Peter Källman
- in Reviews
This suite from the ongoing Planet Earth III is very strong. It is an epic piece featuring soaring background choirs, strong majestic horns, clacky metallic percussion, decisive rhythmic patterns and a nice melodic path to follow with your ears. All in all it paints a lovely picture, even without the visuals.
This project is a collaboration between Hans Zimmer, Jacob Shea and Sara Barone. If you have the habit of listening to film music, odds are you already know who Hans Zimmer is. He is a prominent composer in the film industry, having worked on pictures such as The Dark Knight Trilogy, Gladiator, Interstellar, Pirates of the Caribbean series, The Lion King, Dunkirk, The Da Vinci Code, Blade Runner 2049, Rain Man, Man of Steel, Crimson Tide, and many more.
His partners on this project, Jacob Shea and Sara Barone have worked on many industry film projects too, sometimes alongside Hans.
Hans Zimmer is one of the current godfathers of scoring music to film. How does he continue to make such high quality film scores so that I find myself loving everything he releases? With other artists who make more “conventional music” the hit or miss rate is much different. Hans Zimmer does not miss. The simple answer probably goes like this: The difference is in the making of the songs. In film scoring, the final product is much more controlled. This is because the music to a high budget film usually takes more resources than the song produced by a bedroom artist or even a team of songwriters. Film music is also tied to a different purpose because it is meant to be more of a supporting role to the cinematics. A bedroom artist can top the charts and make industry quality songs all on their own just using software and samples. Film scores on the other hand usually require hiring live musicians and a lot of back and forth between the visual/musical department. The genre of film music is more standardized and tied to a bigger machinery. This makes it even more fascinating how Hans Zimmer time and time again releases soundtracks to movies with such strong identity that still work so well with the pictures. Hans Zimmer has mastered his own musical abilities but also how to make the machine of extremely musically gifted people move with him. I don’t know if you could tell but I am very much sold.
