Mikal Cronin Scores New Conner O’Malley Short Film The Mask

Over the last couple years, Mikal Cronin has occasionally provided music for videos by the comedian Conner O’Malley. Today, Cronin has released his first full-length soundtrack as a result of his collaborations with O’Malley. It’s a score for a short film called The Mask, which is available via O’Malley’s website Endorphin Port for five bucks. It’s described as “a short film about Tyler Joseph a young man from illinois who loves whose line is it anyway and the mask.”

“My first soundtrack album is here! I made enough music for @conner_omalley_ ‘s film “the mask” (see it at endorphinport.com) that I thought it’d be fun to release it all separately,” Cronin wrote in an Instagram post. “I make a lot of soundtrack music these days, this won’t be the last album of instrumental music.”

In a new interview with Vulture, O’Malley talked about The Mask and his move to start offering up some of his short videos for sale via his website:

The Mask was a sizzle reel for a TV pitch. We got a very small amount of money from a production company, and then I put a lot of my own money into it. It’s where I met [producers] Reggie Henke and Katie Dolan, who worked on it. Danny edited it again. That happened during the pandemic, and it just kind of slowly started to turn into something else that wasn’t a sizzle reel, which are usually two to five minutes long, just to give you a little taste of what it’s going to be like.

We ended up having a 20-minute cut of this thing that’s more of a short film, but I didn’t know how to do a two-minute version of it that’s just me acting weird on the street. I don’t know if it would have conveyed an idea of a series. Then me and the production company parted ways, and I was like, I think this could be something else. It really occupies a zone that I think is interesting. It’s not a series; it’s not a movie. It’s kind of in the middle. It feels very much made to watch on a laptop in bed at three in the morning or for people to watch on Chromecast on a TV.

Listen to Cronin’s The Mask score below and check out a trailer for the short.