Film Score Postmortem

I recently scored an indy film by working entirely remotely — me in my East Coast studio, filmmakers on the West Coast — and this is a recap of what went right and wrong about the project.

Right

• Correspondence and the spotting session was smooth, and we exchanged spotting notes over email and mockups of my music and the film itself using the yousendit.com service (which I recommend). A spotting session, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the meeting in which the composer sits with the director (and music editor if there is one) and decides exactly where music will start and stop, along with some general notes about the type of music. The spotting notes presume a locked print (a shady presumption sometimes) because you end up with a list of cues detailed to the exact SMPTE frame, so you know how long each cue is going to be.
• I was on the same page as the filmmakers about the style of music. The music style was TV-like, and by that I mean it called for a good bit of rhythmic modern percussion, electronic sounds that could sound like electronic sounds (as opposed to emulating acoustic sounds), and bass lines could be front-and-center, without a lot of melodic lines and very little orchestral sounds outside of strings. I count this a “good thing” because it’s exactly the sort of music I wanted to write; it would have been a downer to be told by the director that I needed an all-orchestral score or a flamenco score, for example. I had been working with writing minimal acoustic and live bass parts in conjunction with sound synthesis and groove experiments, so it not only fit what I thought worked for the project, but it was also a style I was personally really interested in.
• I liked working with the director. This is pretty key, at least as important as the musical creative and production craft. It is, after all, the director’s vision which I’m enhancing rather than my own original work. I’m not writing a symphony or song here or trying to be a rock star, but rather adding audio to improve a visual story directed by someone else.

Wrong

• It was a bit of a rush job; 15 minutes of music composed and produced in about 8 days. The average for the industry is supposedly about 30 finished seconds per day. It’s a lot of work to engineer and produce a composition which is still in progress, but I like doing both nearly simultaneously; like everyone else, though, I would have preferred just a little more time. In a way the lack of time was a good thing since it prevented endless tweaking, but there are certain cues which I’d like to have polished a bit more.
• The print to which I wrote turned out to be pretty far from a final cut. This is a problem because I wrote many of those cues not just as play-through underscore but as harmonic beds and recurring motifs which started on specific hits, changed with certain actions and character shots, and ended on exact frames. I didn’t Mickey-Mouse it, but certain hits were important — especially on a couple of the longer cues. The film needed more editing, though, and I do agree that the final edit improved the overall story — but the music no longer fit, and was sort of cut up (without my involvement) in a way that I thought was far less effective than if I’d had a chance to rewrite a couple of those cues. I didn’t mind a couple of cues being dropped altogether — sometimes music really isn’t needed where everyone previously thought it was — but the chopped up cues bothered me a little. So although I think the picture was improved by the edit, I wish I’d had the chance to rewrite a couple of those cues to fit the new edit.

Overall it was an enjoyable week-and-a-half experience, and I’m glad I had a chance to meet this director, as I think he’s quite talented; it was also proof that you really can work remotely as a composer on a film project without actually meeting face-to-face (although I still prefer to meet if possible).

Here are a few excerpted cues from the film — with the obvious caveat these make less sense as solitary pieces of audio than they do as accompaniment and enhancement for the visuals:

1M3 - Office Undescore - 0:31

1M6 - A Tender Moment - 0:44

1M11 - Build to Heaven - 1:39

Closing Credits Excerpt - 0:53