#MOCRAZY STRONG
When professional skier Jamie MoCrazy suffered a serious traumatic brain injury following a ski accident, her life cartwheeled upside down. With the educated support of her family and medical caregivers, Jamie not only survived, but made a full recovery, helping revolutionize early stage TBI treatment, change protocol surrounding family involvement, and now inspiring others.
The Music
The film is available to watch on Amazon Prime.
The Story
I have known Jamie MoCrazy and her family for the last 15 years through ski racing. She and my kids trained at Waterville Valley NH. We left in 2009 and moved to Vail CO for my kids to pursue their ski racing passion. Shortly after, Jamie and her family also left Waterville and moved to Park City UT where she and her sister Jeanne Crane-Mauzy could pursue their passion for freestyle skiing. We stayed in touch, catching up over the years when Jamie and Jeanne would be competing or training at Copper Mountain or Aspen CO.
Ski racing and freestyle skiing are great sports for adrenaline junkies like Jamie and my kids. They are also dangerous. When I heard that Jamie suffered a life-threatening brain injury in 2015, I cried for the family because two years earlier, my oldest son had a serious ski accident that damaged his internal organs and broke his femur. I also had another son fracture his tailbone, vertebrae and shoulder in a ski accident in 2015. Although Jamie’s condition was more serious than my sons’, I knew the feeling as a mother when your child’s body is broken, their dreams shattered, and you have no idea what the journey to recovery will be or if there will be a recovery.
In 2022, Jeanne was staying at my house while she trained for the season and told me that she and Jamie were making a short documentary about Jamie’s traumatic brain injury (TBI) and her miraculous recovery. I was in the midst of working on my Certificate for Orchestration for Film and TV at Berklee College and writing music every day. When I shared my work with Jeanne, she put me in touch with Mark Locki, the Co-Director and Co-Producer of the film. Mark and I met over zoom and connected over music, working with nonprofits, and contributing to social change. After watching his previous films (all done with library music), I knew I could write music that would help him tell Jamie’s story.
I loved working on this film. It was my first film and will always have a special place in my heart. It was also Mark’s first time working with a music composer. He was a dream to work with. Mark is collaborative, creative, positive, responsive, organized and a great communicator. Since we lived in two different countries, all our collaboration was over zoom, email and dropbox. I would send him music and he would send me comments. We did our spotting session over zoom. We met for the first time at the film’s premier at the Big Sky Film Festival in Missoula MT. There we bonded over beers and a love of films. (Shout out to Cranky Sam’s Public House for the free beer coupons for filmmakers!)
The film was selected for screening at 15 Film Festivals this year and won an award for the best biographical documentary short at the Atlanta DocuFest. It is now available to view on Amazon Prime.
Production Details
Short Documentary
18 minutes
Directors: Jamie MoCrazy and Mark Locki
Producers: Jamie MoCrazy and Mark Locki
2023
Music Notes
I tend to write melodic and thematic music for films. However, with a documentary, I needed to simplify and subdue the music to sit under the dialogue. While many of the cues are textural and support the emotional rollercoaster of the story, I found a way to weave in small motifs that tied the story together. Jamie’s life was on one trajectory before her accident, but after the accident she created a new trajectory for herself. I wanted the music to reflect that the accident changed what she did in her life, but not who she was at her core. She was still the same goal driven, hard working, adventurous person that she was when she was 5 years old.
I created a motif for Jamie’s childhood athletics as a gymnast and skier, and used a marimba and bassoon to play it over strings in “Fearless Fantasy.” This motif evolved into a new motif when she shifted to the big jumps of freestyle skiing and became a professional athlete. I asked Jamie what she listened to when she trained and prepared for her competitions. She gave me a list of hip hop and pop music . . . all with themes around women and their power. I loved her playlist and I continue to listen to it to this day. It inspired me to explore hip hop beats and I wrote a feminine hip hop cue to go with the montage of her jumping and flipping through the air in “Sky’s The Limit,” creating my own original beat loops and overlaying them with some of the cool loops that I found in Logic’s library. I also combined a couple synth sounds to play the motif (when people were not talking, of course).
The third motif shows up in “Changed My Life” when her family tells the story of Jamie’s accident at the World Tour Finals at Whistler. It is a simple four note motif played with chimes. This motif shows up in this scene as the seriousness of her accident unfolds and later in the film when Jamie is struggling with her recovery and mental health. I also created a slow sad version of the hip hop motif to play with a solo violin as her mother hears about her daughter’s accident and rushes to her bedside, expecting her to die.
Fragments of her childhood and pro-skier motifs show up throughout her recovery, because there are glimpses of Jamie’s determination, fighting spirit, and work ethic as she tackles the long road of her recovery. These motifs return in their full form at the end of the film in “Dream Again” when Jamie talks about her new life as a TBI advocate, motivational speaker, her wedding on top of Whistler, and the non-profit, MoCrazy Strong Foundation, that she founded. However, I transform them by having them played by a full string section along with hip hop beats in the background, fusing the two styles of music, to symbolize that Jamie is the same person she was as a professional athlete but with a new path as an adult . Her spirit and life experience has fused together, transforming her as she dedicates herself to her new purpose in life: improving the lives of families and individuals impacted by a TBI injury.