Our society is enamored with movie stars, but Hollywood couldn’t make movie magic without a host of behind-the-scenes contributors. While we may not be able to put a face to the names that appear a bit further down the credits, many of these men and women have inspired us all the same.
Late Oscar-winning composer James Horner played an integral part in several classic films during his life, providing scores to Aliens, Avatar, Apollo 13, Glory, and Braveheart just to name a few. When such films hit their denouement, the audience’s cheers and/or tears are often as much the product of powerful music as they are of superlative acting or directing.
The team over at Cinefix — a company that re-imagines films as old-school video games — understands this and has composed a moving 8-bit tribute to Horner’s work.
Related: James Horner, Oscar-winning Titanic composer, dies in plane crash
The result is a tear-jerking dose of nostalgia that will make you want watch every film Horner ever worked on while simultaneously playing vintage video games on a separate screen.
The video includes pixelated renderings of some of the most memorable films the composer took part in, alongside MIDI-fied versions of his music playing in the background. At the end of the tribute, Cinefix’s David and Henry Dutton speak to the influence that Horner had on their lives, and explain that they used to buy movie scores on cassette tapes in their youth.
First posted by CNET, you can watch the entire 3-minute tribute in the embedded video above and you can also find more of Cinefix’s work on their Youtube Channel. Be sure to check out both Shawshank Redemption and Jurassic Park on “8-bit Cinema.”
We’re glad to see a man who contributed to dozens of classic films getting his just due, though his untimely passing is tragic to say the least.
James Horner died on June 22nd, 2015 in a plane crash. He was 61 years old.
