The other day, I was pointed in the direction of a documentary about the making of Aliens, specifically the section about James Horner, the composer for the film.
It was during this section where he commented on the poor planning of the film and the subsequent chaos it caused with the job he’d been hired to do. When he came onto the project he was given six weeks to score the film, including recording time. By the time he arrived in England to begin the process however, he found that much less than having picture lock ready for him, they hadn’t even finished shooting yet.
Here is the link to documentary, with the relevant section around 2:09.
I found this to be an interesting watch for several reasons. For one, it explained the difficulty in writing music for film and then subsequently having to change it to fit the timings of a film is said timings have been changed, something which I’ve come across on several occasions in the past, in a much better way than I’ve ever been able to. The description of which helped give me confidence in an issue from the perspective that even the professionals find that difficult, which is a reassuring thought.
The next important point from this was the fact that all this chaos was happening on a multi million dollar blockbuster film and on a film that has gone on to remain widely respected. As such it tells you to never expect things to go swimmingly in this business and the best you can hope for is that the people you work with are understanding. This plays well into the project we are undertaking at the moment in the sense that while everything is currently going well, in a week or two it may not be the case. This especially applies to me as a composer for two of the films, not to mention films I’m working on outside of this project. Once directors hear music, they often ask for changes to be made, sometimes incredibly small things, other times larger things. Normally, I don’t find this to be too much of an issue, after all, if I’m only involved in the film as a composer, the music is my only concern and often my point of contact is straight with the director, which leaves me feeling freer to organise meetings and send material straight to them, which then of course, gives me more time to make adjustments and generally talk to them more about the music. In this project however, I feel like I haven’t had that same relationship with directors, which is in part down to the volume of work we have to do and the number of films I’m working on, but also, in part down to the way we are operating, with different audio leads for each film, something that generally a composer doesn’t deal with, they answer straight to the director/producer or in some cases a music supervisor.
Overall, this post was to highlight that finding out things like this about big production and big name composers helps to make me feel better about the state of things, giving me confidence in what I’m doing and the way in which I’m doing things. This was in relation to learning outcome one.