Chicken

Original score for the animated short by Anna Benner

What do we burn when our world is already on fire? In Anna Benner's eight-minute animated short, a woman fleeing a terrible relationship stumbles and finds herself eye to eye with a chicken. The two share a moment, a cigarette, and the urge to burn down everything around them. What follows is a painted flight of fancy about the elation of finally breaking out of a cycle of pain.

I wrote the score for strings, then sent the recordings back out through an old tube amplifier. Reamping gave the strings a distortion they could never produce on their own: warm at first, then scorched and unstable as the amp is pushed harder. That grit carries the two things the film is about: the toxicity of the relationship she is running from and the fire she is running towards.

Chicken won Best Animation at the Kurzfilmtage Flensburg. The soundtrack album collects the complete score, together with a previously unreleased cue and alternate mixes.