Cmiral still has 'Pulse'

Composer Elia Cmiral scores 'Pulse'
Composer Elia Cmiral scores Pulse for director Jim Sonzero and The Weinstein Company/Dimension Films. Inspired by a popular Japanese film, the Wes Craven-penned thriller tells the story of young computer hackers who channel a mysterious signal that opens a doorway to another world, full of forces looking for a portal to cross over in order to wreak havoc. Starring a hot young cast that includes Kristen Bell, Ian Somerhalder and Christina Milian, the film opens August 11. This is Cmiral's second collaboration with Craven, having scored Wes Craven Presents: They in 2002.

For Pulse, Cmiral crafted a contemporary electronica/modern orchestral score. Using an ISDN connection from his home in Los Angeles, he conducted seventy minutes of score with a sixty piece orchestra located in his native Czech Republic. With three programmers to handle the huge amount of sound design and five orchestrators, he used extensive synths and percussion programming, a programmed choir and live voices including his own. "The work was intense," he says, "(director) Jim Sonzero made me explore every possible or impossible musical and sonic corner."

Born in Czechoslovakia, Elia Cmiral quickly established himself as one of Europe's leading young composers after graduating from the prestigious Prague Music Conservatory. He wrote scores for several European films and three ballets before coming to the United States to attend USC's famous Film Scoring Program, after which he was hired to produce tango-based music for Apartment Zero, composing a now-classic full length score in a scant ten days. By the mid-1990s, Cmiral had garnered a reputation with Hollywood executives, and after scoring the successful Nash Bridges television series, he was selected to score John Frankenheimer's suspense thriller Ronin starring Robert DeNiro. Following the success of Ronin, Elia has continued to provide highly original and evocative scores for major Hollywood studios as well as independent filmmakers, including Stigmata, Battlefield Earth, Bones and Species 3.

This year, in addition to Pulse, Cmiral scored the dark drama Journey to the End of the Night, directed by Eric Eason for Millennium Films, which premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival in New York.