A music soundtrack written by a Campbells Creek local has been nominated for a Screen Music Australia award.
Rob Law composed the music for the documentary film The Magnitude Of All Things, which had its international premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival in Canada in late 2020.
Directed by Canadian Jennifer Abbot, the award-winning documentary explores psychological themes of climate grief alongside the filmmaker’s own personal grief at losing her sister to cancer, and had its Australian premiere at last year’s Sydney Film Festival.
It launched in Victoria at the Theatre Royal as part of the Castlemaine Documentary Film Festival in December.
“These are like the Logies or Grammys for screen and film music composers so I’m very stoked,” Law told the Express, after learning the soundtrack he composed had been nominated in the Best Music For A Documentary category.
“It’s really wonderful to get the nomination alongside other nominees who I have admired for decades,” he said.
Law is perhaps best known to many as CEO of the Central Victorian Greenhouse Alliance, a role he is soon to vacate after nine years to focus more of his time on musical composition and on “having a home-dad role” as his wife works full time.
But the modest yet talented musician and composer, who concedes he tends to keep his musical activities somewhat close to his chest, has been composing for the past 20 years, with the past decade particularly focused on music for TV and film.
“I’m now working on the music for an Adidas commercial,” he said.
“It’s less glamorous but it pays the bills.
“Working on The Magnitude of All Things aligned with my other world of working on Climate Change,” said Law who made his first foray into composing for full-length screen productions with the 2017 Taylor Steele film Proximity – a portrait of modern surfing.
“I worked on The Magnitude of All Things during the Black Summer fires and from out of my studio window I could see the ominous red skies,” said Law who recorded the music at the Campbells Creek sound recording studio of Alex Bennett.
“The film is really focused on the emotional impacts of climate change in people, climate grief that people experience, and looks at how we can use that to do something about it,” he said.
The film has itself collected various prestigious awards while doing the international film festival rounds since its release, and Law said the next step would be making it available online with arrangements about which streaming platform would be used currently being sorted through.
The other contenders now in the running for Screen Music Australia’s title of Best Music for a Documentary are Chef Antonio’s Recipes for Revolution composed by Cezary Skubiszewski; Playing with Sharks composed by Caitlin Yeo and Quoll Farm composed by Maria Grenfell.
All of the talented composers, including Law, will now have to wait until February 22 to find out which soundtrack ultimately clinches the title.
