When I first read about the plane crash and death of James Horner, my heart dropped. Although I never personally knew him, I knew his passion, very, very well. Most kids would prefer to listen to normal music on the radio but for me growing up even well into my teens, all I would really listen to was movie soundtracks. I was an aspiring filmmaker, we didn’t even have the internet to look things up, when a movie came out and I liked the music from it, I would buy the soundtrack on CD and play it over and over. The music, I strongly believe helped spark my imagination, which is insanely vivid. Even today, I listen to soundtracks while I work. It ignites something in my brain and I become very visual. Little did I realize how James Horner’s music was a large part of my collection. I can hum through entire soundtracks of Titanic, Mighty Joe Young, The Land Before Time, and countless others.
After he died, I looked up his work on IMDB and found even more stuff that was a huge part of my childhood that I remembered. The soundtracks to Honey I Shrunk The Kids and The Rocketeer were amazing and we can’t forget about Braveheart and Avatar.
James Horner helped carve my imagination as I was writing my own movies as a kid. I even used soundtracks in my short films. His music is timeless, it is magical, it takes you to a place and I will always be grateful for that.
This is a short film I made when I was clearly inspired by Titanic which has lots of James Horner’s music. The Patriarch was made on a Super Nintendo with the art game Mario Paint a camcorder and a cassette recorder and speaker to play the audio mix.
