Linkin Park’s Blueprint For Merging Music And Film

Linkin Park’s Joe Hahn was a professional filmmaker long before he was a professional musician, in a way.

In 1996, he started working as a concept artist for a handful of special effects houses. Hahn found that directors and producers would often stop by to ask him and his colleagues how to turn an ambiguous or unimaginative part of a script into an incredible effect that would carry the film forward.

“We would have to … figure out a way to make those words into something,” says Hahn. “That’s w...