Composers Book Club is a new revolutionary podcast coming soon on Film Scoring Tips. Learn how to submit your music and participate to the first episode here.

Introducing the show host: Robert Drane

When I started thinking about a Book Club made for composers, Robert Drane was the first person that came to mind. To my delight he said yes to hosting the show.

To the most loyal readers Robert’s name will sound familiar. He is the author behind two of our most successful articles, about SEO and showreels.

Learn a little bit more about Composers Book Club and get a sneak-peek of what a wonderful host Robert will bee with the preview video below.

The post Composers Book Club – Meet the host appeared first on film scoring tips.

UPDATE: we’ve extended the submission deadline and changed the recording date.

We also just published a separate story to introduce the show’s host: Robert Drane (sneak peek below).

Let’s write some music

A few weeks ago, we announced the start of the Film Scoring Tips Composers Book Club. To recap, the concept is to read a book, score an excerpt, then meet up in a video call to discuss our thoughts and music. 

For our first meet (to be held online on Friday June 5 @6PM BST), we chose the book Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. Hopefully you’ve had time to get yourself a copy and start reading (I’s not long – I finished it in a weekend!). 

Here are all the details on what scene to score with your music. 

The Excerpt

Your mission, should you choose to accept it…

Please submit a piece of original music no longer than 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Your composition should be suitable to use as underscore for the start of Chapter Six up to the line “He had no time for his mother’s fantasy world”. 

When you’re ready, please submit your using the form below. 

Here’s a suggested structure – you don’t have to follow it exactly if you don’t want to:

• 30 seconds of the transition from Artemis gloating about the end of the previous chapter, then transitioning to his thoughts about capturing the fairy 
• 30 seconds of anticipation that Artemis’ dad might be back
• 1-1:30 minutes of the mother scene 
• End with Artemis making the decision to go back to his criminal ways 

Why did we choose this scene? This moment stood out to me from the whole book. It really demonstrates Artemis’ desire to be a child, which is often at odds to his desperation to live up to his family’s criminal ways. 

Personally, I really like how much Artemis’ emotions transform through this section. At first, he’s feeling smug, then a bit of guilt about the fairy, then suddenly there’s hope that his dad has returned, then we witness the tragedy of his mother’s condition, and finally Artemis makes a decisive choice to have “no time for his mother’s fantasy world”.

Deadline

Please submit your track by Wednesday June 3 at 11:59PM (BST).

A few recommendations

We kindly ask you to submit music you specifically create for the selected excerpt. Anything that we deem to be out of context will not be considered.

Submit your music only if you can attend our first book club on Friday June 5 @6PM BST.

The submission form also serves as a legally binding license assignment document. Therefore we kindly ask to only submit music you own in its entirety. However we only ask for a non-exclusive license, meaning you will still be able to use the music on other projects.

The file format must be MP3 and the file-size must be under 5MB. In case you come up with a larger file-size please re-compress it using a lower bitrate.

Submit your music here

Please use the form below to submit your music:

If the form should not work with your device/browser please use this page instead.

Good luck

We’re really looking forward to sharing your music and meeting your on our group video call! 

See you soon. 

The post Composers Book Club 01 – Submissions open (UPDATE) appeared first on film scoring tips.

I love reading. I read any kind of books, I usually jump from sci-fi, to biographies, from fantasy, to textbooks on various topics. What I look for in my reading is to turn the last page of a book and feel I’ve learned something, that I have grown in some ways. When I finished reading Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup not only I felt I knew a lot about lean management but also that I could improve some of the aspects of my work as a composer following those same principles. Before we sink in the first topic of this multi-part series here is a bit of context:

Toyota and lean manufacturing

The concept of lean management—an approach to running an organization through small, incremental changes in processes that improves efficiency and quality—has its roots in a revolutionary way of manufacturing cars invented by Toyota. Both methods are centered on waste minimization and strong productivity, two things that every composer should try to achieve in her/his workflow. Over the course of the next weeks we will explore some of the key tools that Ries absorbed from studying lean manufacturing and then applied to startups and see how we can further interpret them to improve the quality of our work as composers. Without further ado let me introduce to you this week’s topic:

Less is more, enter the MVP

MVP stands for “minimum viable product” and it is one of the fundamental players in the Lean strategy. In the startup world creating products that are just good enough to be put in the hands of customers means obtaining priceless data or “metrics” very soon in the process and with a minimum investment of resources, energy and above all time. This ensures a healthy product growth and the possibility to make radical changes, if needed, without leaning too heavily on assumptions.

Minimum viable cue, the MVC

Every composer has been there many times, I am sure: you spend hours making sure your first batch of cues is perfect, you walk the extra mile, hardly get any sleep, eat junk food for days, finally you send them and get asked for complete rewrites. All those hours, all that energy wasted. What if instead you had saved some resources for such a scenario? With more energy left in your batteries it is easier to see you aren’t in such the bad shape you might think you are: sometimes a few focused changes might revert the situation and get your cue approved (more about this when talking about pivots in part 2). So here is a list of recommendations that will help you creating a minimum viable cue (MVC):

Keep your orchestration essential

This one takes the first spot in the list because it is one of the places where I find myself struggling more. I have to restrain myself from creating complete orchestrations in this phase but it can really help. Not only you will need to invest a smaller amount of time in each cue but chances are you will also send music that is easier for the director to assess. The important elements will stand out more and you can always refine the orchestration once the cue is approved.

A decent mock-up is good enough

Of a similar nature of the previous one, this might raise a few eyebrows. I get it, you are a mock-up nerd (so am I). But I like to think about myself that the fact I can make very realistic mock-ups is not the reason I get hired, the quality of my writing is. Creating convincing mock-ups can take several hours of work that could go wasted if the cue is rejected for reasons non-related to the mock-up itself. If you haven’t done it yet I suggest fine tuning your template so that you can reach a fair level of realism with a small investment of time and energy. Rest assured, once the cue is approved you still can (and probably should) maniacally refine the sound of those instruments that are not going to record until they sound just like the real thing!

Only tackle one cue per theme

This one is a no-brainer, but it is such an important one that it’s worth mentioning it. As good as a you think a theme you came up with might be don’t compose more than one cue featuring that theme before having it approved. Just imagine the frustration generated by a cue rejection multiplied by the number of cues you composed with that theme at their core…

Don’t be overzealous with your mixing/mastering

By now you should know the drill… You spend a full day mixing and mastering your cues, you send them over, the director rejects them and you have wasted all that precious time! Try creating quick mixes/masters, maybe even resort to an automatic solution (like using plugins presets or the master assistant in Izotope Ozone and the like) and wait until the cue is approved for the heavy fiddling.

In conclusion

In this phase you are generally not expected to send cues that are already perfect, chances are that the people who hired you already know you can achieve a great level of detail with your work. But this is the phase where you are expected to find good solutions fast. Becoming a Lean Composer can mean building a reputation for being the fastest guy in town!

What’s next?

After we send the first batch of cues we inevitably get a call or an email back with a review, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. But believe it or not, even negative ones can move us a step forward. By interpreting these “metrics” correctly we can leverage on the work already done to produce a new version of the cue closer to being approved. In the next chapter we will explore the concept of pivots and how they can lead to nailing even the most difficult cues.

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