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First time scoring directly to picture

Dyllan

New Member
Hi everyone. I was given the opportunity to score a short film front to back, after the same producer was very pleased with another project I'd worked on. I feel a lot more anxious about this project, so I've expanded my orchestra, read up on my theory/orchestration, watched swathes of films, and even brute-forced my DAW to work in 5.1 sound, but I'm still nervous.
I feel like such a novice, anyone have any tips to gain confidence in your craft?
 
Watch the film and place a ton of markers in your DAW with descriptions like "hit this" (on the exact cut you want to hit) or "die down here", or "swell", "build", "add perc", "change up", whatever makes sense to you as you're watching it. If you're just starting out, the more markers the merrier, it will help. I don't know which DAW you're using but make sure the markers are locked to real time so that they stay locked to the video when you change tempo. Keep in mind that if the video is not locked and they change the cut on you all your markers are pretty much f-cked... so that might be a deciding factor in how in-depth you wind up going with the markers.

To start, I like to watch each scene and get a tempo in mind that I think is close and put it in the DAW, then you can massage the tempo and time sigs to hit whichever markers you want to hit. Even the markers you don't actually hit with the music will help you to tell the story. If it's an important hit I like to put in a 3/4 or 5/4 measure (or even 3/8 5/8 or whatever works) to make the hit on a downbeat. You don't need to, obviously a hit can be anywhere, but I think it helps when writing the track to have important things on downbeats of measures.

Silence and/or ringouts are your best friends. Besides letting the track breathe, this is where you can insert random amounts of time in order to line up future hits.

That is the super-duper brief cliff notes version, obviously there's a lot more to it. Remember at all times that the most important thing is always the video and never the music. This is a good thing to stop and remind yourself about from time to time. Good luck!
 
Spitfire has a current youtube series about scoring a short film... should be helpful. I also suggest a very large sombrero for confidence.

Check that... it's a feature film, but may still be of use:
 
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