This year I plan on writing a lot more for Getting the Score, filling it with a lot more useful information that helps both me and those who read.
Please if you could take the time to let me know what you would like to read about in “Getting The Score” below. Multiple choices are allowed. And don’t forget to sign up to the blog!
Loading …If you have any other ideas on subjects you would like covered in GTS, just write them down in the comment section.
I get asked this more and more often, so I thought I would write a short blog post about this subject.
My career is starting to take off, so I feel that I can actually share my thoughts on this subject with some certainty and hopefully help those who read it.
The information may not be complete yet, but please read and comment, ask questions and I will perhaps flesh this out and create a stand-alone page out of this.
Best of luck to you in this promising new year!
As a film composer you will need to write quickly and with facility. You must be flexible and be able to capture a wide variety of moods on a deadline, which means you must have a big palette of colours at your disposal. How do you get that? Music theory and experience both musically and with writing to picture.
There will be no time to experiment under the gun and you won’t get a second chance.
Writing film music is really about being an actor with notes. So make sure you understand story and character and how music plays a role in all that. (“Getting the Score” often deals with that very subject.)
Is is a good business decision to work on having a unique voice in your writing. You must stand out because there is a sea of composers out there. So knowing who you are musically is just as important as being flexible. It’s ideal when you can balance both. Although many have made a living being chameleons, you never notice chameleons, they blend in too well.
So the bottom line is, study, study, study.
Work on projects for new film makers to build your reel, but be a little picky at the same time. You can waste a lot of time saying yes to every project and have them go nowhere, and you right along with them.
Contacts are built by:
“Big follows small” is a law of marketing which also applies to self-promotion in film. Start with small films, build your resumé, and move up.
Being heard is important to build contacts. So put your music out there. Everywhere. The best place is in a film, but Facebook and other social media are also good. Don’t spam.
“We judge ourselves by what we believe we can do, others judge us but what we have done.”
I forget where I read this, but it’s the truth. Especially in film. Your credits will be important and filmmakers will hire you based on them.
Composers ride the wave of success and failure of a film, just like any other part of the creative team. So make sure you pick the best projects that are available to you.
If you don’t have any credits, look to the first point.
You must understand everything you can about films: story, editing, directing, acting and especially story structure and screen writing. This is important in order to be a good dramatist (see first point) but also important to have meaningful discussions with the film makers.
Then you will get hired back.
Come prepared to spotting sessions, have opinions and ideas on how to make the score truly an asset for the film. They hire you for your expertise, so be an expert, bring something to the table and they will appreciate that, every time. Just don’t be a jerk.
Yes, that goes right along with the point above. It’s your job to find the right balance between the two.
So there you have it, a short primer on getting started in film music. Like I wrote above, it’s not complete so please take the time to comment, ask questions and I will fill it out further.
Cheers,
Alain
The landscape of film is constantly changing, with the global recession and the state of pirating, this is true now more than ever.
I have been told more than once that mid-budget films are on the way out and it will either be very low budget or high budget. I don’t know if it’s true or not, I am no economic prognosticator. Others have told me that there needs to be a new model for making films, a more streamlined approach that brings the cost down and the quality up.
So either way this hints at a growing pool of films with low music budgets but high aspirations.
A great soundtrack can dramatically increase the production value of a film, and there is no better way to get a great score than with live musicians. The filmmakers might believe that they can only afford a score with samples and synths, but that is not the case.
Gone will be the army of orchestrators, assistants, mock-up artists and engravers. If the composer is trained (and has solid time-management skills) he can do his own orchestrations and score preparation as I have done many times. Some many even mix their music but I prefer hiring someone for that myself.
This is what I did for “Comforting Skin”, a film where the filmmakers thought they would only get a synth score, but I put together a group of 7 musicians, found a studio and engineer, did all the orchestrations and score preparation myself and ended up with a score that does not need to hide.
Budgets get higher with a full orchestra, but it does not need to be full orchestra all the time, just like you don’t need to see the full set all the time to know you are there, and this way costs go down.
But don’t forget, you can only pick two: cheap, fast or good.
Happy 2012!
A video of John Williams conducting the Train Chase from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade live with an orchestra.
This one is especially insightful as we get to see the streamers and punches used for synchronizing the music to the film during recording sessions.
This requires a very good sense of rhythm and solid baton technique.
This is something I did for a good many cues for my “Legend of Silk Boy” score, conducting the Evergreen Orchestra with streamers and punches to guide me. It was a challenge!
this is called “free conducting”, when not using clicks, and this is great for when the music is very rubato in feel and you wish to achieve a musical result. The click, when it comes to rubato, can make things feel very stiff.
However, for a rhythmic scene like this train chase, where the tempo is pretty steady throughout then clicks would work just as well I would imagine. On the other hand, free conducting allows orchestral musicians to listen to each other the way they normally do, to achieve intonation and phrasing. And if you use a group of musicians used to playing together then that is a real advantage.
So here’s the video!
When you see on-screen action (fighting, running etc…) the music tends to follow along in some way. It might hit some of the action or play along with some cool action music.
But when do you not follow the action?
I am currently scoring the feature film “Comforting Skin”, and there is a moment where a short fight occurs that did not need musical emphasis.
Without giving away too much, I can describe the scene this way: the protagonist has just revealed something important to her friend. This is a climactic moment in the film, an important part of the story’s arc, and the music is a part of it.
Then a secondary character attacks the friend from behind and a short and violent struggle ensues. (Only about 4 seconds of screen time.)
I initially tried music that followed along the short fight, a short burst of musical violence, but it was immediately clear that it didn’t work.
So I thought about it for a minute and asked myself some questions:
Q: This climactic moment is about who? What is important? What is this scene about? (All variations of the same question.)
A: The scene is about that climactic revelation between the two main characters who have the central relationship in the film. This moment is an important one in the arc of their relationship. It is not about that secondary character fighting.
Q: How does this fight relate to this moment?
A: It ties up that secondary character’s role in the story as she gets almost knocked unconscious, but does not affect the core of that scene.
With that in mind I wrote a cue which responded to the climactic reveal; light, ethereal, surreal music. And I played right through the short fight, completely ignoring it, and it worked wonderfully- because it made dramatic sense!
If music hit the action it would emphasize what was not important to that scene and would take away from the important story element.
So, what is the answer to: When should you not hit the action?
The answer is: When it is not driving the story.
Today I am going to rock the boat…
There was a paper written in 2000 entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”
The report states that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:
- tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
- fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
- fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
- recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.
To me, this is first a case for composers to reach high levels of schooling in music.
But something occurred to me from this as well… should directors trust their composers more?
Let me explain, directors are generally not musically trained and if so only at a basic level. All of the directors I have worked with, even the most musical among them, only have a passing awareness of the role of music in films.
And this is normal! Nobody can be an expert at everything.
So, considering the generally small level of film scoring knowledge and skill among directors, a few questions come to mind:
Just a thought…
I am currently scoring a feature film called “Comforting Skin”. Right now I am in the planning stages, setting goals for the score and there is an approach I plan on taking I’d like to discuss here.
This is a dramatic piece with horror, suspense and some supernatural elements. Because of the genre, this is not going to be a big thematic score.
However, there will be motives and themes, and after reviewing the story and film and discussing it in detail with the director, part of my current plan is to have a theme or motive for “dread”.
Dread, this feeling of impending doom, is a main thematic element in the film, it is the drive of the story. (I am being simplistic in order to not give anything in the story away, but you get the idea.)
As the story advances, my plan is to have this motive, or theme, develop in length and strength. I will only hint at it at the start and it will gradually overtake everything.
It will be present when appropriate as other melodies or textures are played and will not be associated to any specific character.
The bottom line is this; a motive or theme doesn’t have to be associated to a character, place or event, but can be something that drives the tone, mood or a concept in the film.
I started work on a new feature film last week and started blogging about it. What I want to talk about here is how the director, Derek Franson, has managed to already have me motivated, inspired and feeling like I will be contributing to the film. I will quote below from my personal blog.
…he is approaching the score for this film as something integral to the story telling, not as mere sonic wallpaper.
He is also very smart in his approach to dealing with me as a composer, providing a careful balance between guidance and freedom in order to create a fertile creative environment
Guidance is important because without goals you cannot aim, and freedom is also needed in order to find a unique voice to the film and allow me to take ownership of the score by putting myself into it. Because if I am just imitating and not being creative, then, what’s the point?
And also, Derek will also avoid the dreaded temp track! The plan is to develop the sound and concept of the score along with the edit and effects.
So directors, take note: this is how you get your composers!
I am so psyched to work on this, I am convinced we will end up with a score of substance that will benefit the film greatly and that I will be very proud of.
Every composer should pass along his knowledge, so Alain is offering private teaching to a limited number of international students through Skype.
With the wonders of web cameras and Skype screen sharing, internet lessons are a rich multimedia experience, combining live on-screen views of Alain composing, correcting your work, analyzing and explaining scores or playing the keyboard as he explains the ins and outs of a certain concept or work.
Study about all aspects of composition, from harmony, form to advanced orchestration and writing to picture.
Read more about the lessons here.
About Your Instructor.
Pixar is doing something right, we all know that. I mean, 9 movies in a row that are big financial hits?
So what are they doing? Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3 put it best right here.
“It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3. “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.”
Creativity, or the act of coming up with something new and good, requires that you play around with ideas without the fear of making mistakes.
So how does that translate to the whole purpose of this blog: getting the score?
I can’t think of anything else right now and I have work to do, but I thought this was a great, great article with a very great message about creativity.
Movies are expensive and people get tense, and the more tense you are the less creative you get because you worry about it being good.
Pixar understands that, they allow their people to be creative and that means making mistakes. It is part of their process and the result? $500 million average gross per movie.
AND happy employees!
