The local documentary hit 'When Voices Rise...' has translated into success not only for director Errol Williams but also for local songwriter Richard Basset.

The movie was Mr. Bassett's first soundtrack and only took "about six weeks of concentrated effort" to complete.

"Errol first approached us about 18 months ago," said Mr. Bassett. "At that time he was organising funding and said he would be in touch, he also said that he would want to give us a rough cut of the film so that we would have an idea of what he was doing."

Mr. Bassett and his colleague Michael Spencer Arscott met in the beginning of the year with Mr. Williams and looked at the rough cut.

"We talked about his creative vision and the type of music he needed to create the type of feeling he wanted in the film," Mr. Bassett said. "Music that was not necessarily from the time. He needed acoustic pieces music to heighten the emotional element of a particular scene. Some of it had to be whimsical to go behind events that I can only best describe as ridiculous and other music to convey tension.

"He also required transitional pieces to move one scene into the next . We took our cue from what he wanted. We agreed to use a piano piece for the opening credit but for the end he wanted something uplifting, something that could get people moving, something to convey that there had been a positive resolution and a form of celebration."

Mr. Bassett and Mr. Spencer Arscott created a reggae/soca piece for this.

"It took us six weeks of concentrated effort to produce the soundtrack," he said. "We kept the rough cut of the film and did what we call "spotting notes" that help us to match a piece of music to a segment of the film according to the time elapsed."

Mr. Bassett said that transitional pieces were about ten seconds long while pieces behind an interview might be as long as a minute.

"The interesting thing with this project was that we had to work with Errol who was in Canada putting together the film while we were here in Bermuda," he said. "We submitted our pieces by MP3 and the Internet. We posted them to an online storage site where he would go to listen to them and give us feedback."

Mr. Williams did reject some of the submitted works but Mr. Bassett said that in most cases he was "spot on".

"The film was changing as we were going along and so we were having to change the music accordingly," he noted.

In some areas Errol felt the music would have been distracting causing people to loose touch with the film. In some cases we were able to alter the music by changing the tempo or removing some of the instruments, so that it fit his requirements. Towards the deadline we were doing a lot of this type of fine tuning."

When the soundtrack was completed Mr. Bassett burned a CD of it and mailed it to Mr. Williams in Canada.

"This is the first feature soundtrack that my company Renascent Music Publishing has done. We did have 29 tracks picked up by MTV Undressed and so we did have some experience with getting music to TV and film projects. But "When Voices Rise" was our first scoring project where we were required to produce music to spec and create certain scenes for certain durations."