Kris Bowers on Why Composing for Secret Invasion’s AI Visuals Was “Very Different”

Liz Shannon Miller
·7 min read
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The post Kris Bowers on Why Composing for Secret Invasion’s AI Visuals Was “Very Different” appeared first on Consequence.

Time to light the lights, get yourself a gun, and go where everybody knows your name: Musically, the most important part of any series is the TV theme song, so this week, Consequence will explore just why that is with TV Theme Songs Week, celebrating this proud tradition with features, interviews, and lists. We’ve also launched our “I Never Skip Intro” merch collection, to honor those who know how to appreciate a classic theme; get yours at the Consequence Shop now.

When Kris Bowers got the opportunity to work on the MCU series Secret Invasion, he knew his music for the Samuel L. Jackson spy thriller would need “to feel epic and huge and exciting, and set the expectations for what a Marvel TV show is meant to feel like,” as he tells Consequence. It’s a challenge the Bridgerton and Dear White People composer was up for, though the AI used for the show’s opening credits didn’t make things easy.

In general, Bowers often has a rough version of the opening credits in front of him when working on a new theme: “There’s been maybe a couple of times where they just know it’s going to be around a minute and they want me to start. But pretty soon after, if not right before I start, I have some sort of rough version of what it is, that only changes slightly over the course of the process.”

The visuals matter hugely, Bowers says, because “you react to whether or not something looks visually dark or bright and exciting. There’s also the desire for things to match, timing-wise.”

When it came to Secret Invasion, though, that process was “very different than anything I’ve worked on.” While Bowers can’t speak to the details of the sequence’s creation by Method Studios, he says that “the designers used AI as a tool to create the imagery that we’re seeing, and it made it so that the process… they weren’t necessarily cutting picture to the music.”

Continues Bowers, “So we had to be really creative. There were times when we had to figure out how to make adjustments to the music without ruining the pacing and the vibe that we have, while recognizing that the AI tool that they were using wouldn’t be able to make a cut right on a beat. I couldn’t say, like, ‘On this beat, can we just cut to this image?’ It wasn’t really going to work like that, for whatever reason, with the tool that they were using. So I then had to figure out, okay, well then if we can’t cut on that beat, can I add something else on that beat? So it feels like there’s something happening musically, even though we can’t make it totally line up.”

Complicating things was an issue known well to composers as “temp love,” which occurs when a placeholder track is used during the editing process on a project, and the director or producer gets too attached to it.  When Bowers was hired to take on the Disney+ series, he began his work on the project by creating a “theme suite,” which included a piece of music designated as Nick Fury’s theme. That track ended up becoming the main title theme, because as Bowers explains, “They just took my theme from the theme suite and plopped it in when they were making the edit for the [main titles]. They were like, ‘Oh, Kris will just replace this later.'”

Instead, though, as Bowers worked on his score, he “found some new sounds and new approaches, and so I went back to rewriting the main title. And every version I did, they were like, ‘We kind of like the first thing that you did.'” He laughs. “So we ended up going with basically the first draft that I had on Nick Fury’s theme for that one. But it definitely set the groundwork for the entire sound of that show.”

Perhaps the most famous example of temp love is 2001: A Space Odyssey: While composer Alex North wrote an entire score for the film, Stanley Kubrick instead decided to stick with the classical tracks he’d used as placeholders during editing. At least in the case of Secret Invasion, the temp track the producers fell in love with was Bowers’ own music. “I’ve had the opposite happen,” Bowers laughs again.

The result, Bowers says, “ends up having this kind of different feel to it, where it’s not maybe as tightly locked as some of the other projects I’ve worked on. But it was a lot of fun to have this challenge of figuring out how to make it still feel like it fits as closely as possible. Like, one of the first things that I tried to do was change the tempo and change things up so that I could hit the cuts a bit more exactly. But they didn’t like abandoning the tempo that they had with the original one. So then we had to go back and figure out how to add hits here and there, so that it felt like it was still hitting on the right spots.”

Bowers says that usually, his opening themes won’t be the first thing he composes for a series — instead, “maybe halfway through the season, the production team will come to me and say, ‘Hey, we, we want to focus on the main theme now.’ I feel like they do that for two reasons. One, because they want to figure out what they’re going to do visually, which oftentimes will influence whether or not they want to have a song or what they want musically. But also it gives us a bit of time to figure out what the sound of the show is.”

In fact, he adds, “I think Secret Invasion is one of the only times where a piece of music I wrote before I started scoring ended up being the main title. And like I said, we still tried to do it that other way, where we wrote [new material] in the middle of the season. It just ended up going back [to the original]. Most of the time, I’d say it’s halfway through the season, if not towards the end of the season, that I end up writing the main title.”

Bowers’ first experience writing a theme song was for a Kobe Bryant ESPN series called Detail. “I don’t even think it’s on my IMDB,” he says. “It was him talking through basketball footage, and it was all about the details that you are trying to observe as a player on that level when you’re watching game footage.” (His theme was also reused for a second season, featuring Peyton Manning.)

Since then, he’s taken on a wide variety of projects, each with their own challenges. For example, Bowers says that because Bridgerton focuses on a different pair of lovers every season, the producers wanted the main title theme to “not be something that was specific to a cue in the show, primarily because they wanted it to be pliable to all of the different seasons.” A theme song based on a cue from Simon (Regé-Jean Page) and Daphne’s (Phoebe Dynevor) story in Season 1, after all, might not fit with what’s to come for Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) and Colin (Luke Newton) in Season 3.

While writing a TV theme song can be a pretty lucrative proposition in terms of royalties, Bowers’ work has largely been for streaming services, which don’t pay out as lucratively compared to broadcast television; he did compose the score for ABC’s For the People, but that show didn’t have a theme song — just a title card and musical sting. “I feel totally fine with how my royalties have been, but I’ve heard of people buying planes because of their TV shows,” he says. “It definitely doesn’t feel like anything close to that these days.”

Still, the value of a theme song remains quite clear to him. Says Bowers, “When you have a strong theme, that piece of music also becomes another reminder of the show — and an indelible connection between a theme and the show. And when both of those things are very strong, it creates another way for that show to be remembered, in a way that would be lost without it, for sure.”

Kris Bowers on Why Composing for Secret Invasion’s AI Visuals Was “Very Different”
Liz Shannon Miller

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