Zack Hemsey’s “Mind Heist” Performed Live at Scream Awards
I’m sure all of you know who Zack Hemsey is, which is a pretty remarkable thing to say. Every once and a while a movie trailer comes a long, and it has a piece of music in it that ends up defining the film. Inception was that movie, and “Mind Heist” was that music.
You can listen to the track here on Hemsey’s Bandcamp.
“Mind Heist” was a custom cue, composed by Zack Hemsey, for the third Inception trailer. It’s very rare when a trailer piece creates such a stir as “Mind Heist” did when the trailer came out. The only other piece I can think that comes close is Thomas Bergersen’s “Freedom Fighters” from the Star Trek trailer. Obviously Hemsey did something right as everyone seemed to be talking more about the music than the film.
If you happened to catch the Scream Awards on Spike TV, you would have seen “Mind Heist” performed live at the end of the show, when Christopher Nolan accepted his award of the ‘Ultimate Scream’. The trailer music was being played on stage to represent the film. The could have chosen a track from the score. They chose the trailer track instead. Pretty darn cool. Was it really live though? The drumming looks ridiculous. The players were probably there for show, but who cares; they went all out as you can see in the video below:
A while ago, AdTunes did a short interview with Hemsey. It was very informative and interesting, but I can no longer find it. I had intended to write an article about Hemsey and the track, and I had quoted Hemsey from the article. He went into some detail about how the trailer was composed for the piece- or wait- I meant the other way around. Or not?
“I was not able to see any of the edit or visuals that were being worked on. So there was a constant back and forth between the editing and the music — I would hand in music, they would edit to the music, and then they would edit the music itself, and then I would re-conform my session to their edit and incorporate the latest adjustments and revisions that were necessary, and hand in the next updated piece of music. This went on for weeks — in the end, I think the version that ended up on the trailer was something like the 8th version. Fortunately, I was at least able to see the previous two trailers, which at least gave me an idea of the type of visuals — I think that really helped me wrap my head around what was going on.” -Zack Hemsey
If you liked Mind Heist, you should check out Zack’s newest release: R.E.F. (or Warrior’s Lullaby). It’s quite good, and should be appealing to the epic music junkie.
I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of Zack Hemsey in the future, as the Inception trailer propelled him into the spotlight. He has since composed the music for The Towntrailer. Yeah, that’s probably why you liked that music too.
