The Hollywood Reporter has some roundtable conversations with composers available for viewing on YouTube, which are very helpful sources of information for the way in which composers work in the industry.
In this one for example many topics are covered, from how the composers feel when showing directors their work, to challenges they faced on specific films to how they find inspiration for the music and how they decide upon which style of music to use on a film and so on.
One of the key things to take from this is the degree of experimentation on display, especially in the creative process of deciding how something should be scored. For example, Hans Zimmer using organs in the Interstellar score because it was a complex instrument, much like the complex ideas presented in the movie. Odd ideas such as that help to show that ideas for music can come from anywhere and as such there is no right or wrong way to go about doing something. An example of this in my work this semester is on Descent, in which I use a Waterphone – an instrument I had no idea even existed three weeks ago, however, I stumbled across it and liked the sound and therefore ended up using it in a few moments in the score, which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t have been experimenting with sounds.
Another aspect which comes up several times is the idea of understanding the film that you’re scoring. Both John Powell and Hans Zimmer talk about this, with Zimmer saying that him and Christopher Nolan talked mainly about the story rather than music as such, which helps to further the point that understanding the message of a film and the ideas it wants to portray or characters it wants to show are vital to working out how to score something. Some directors however take a different approach, with Elfman saying that Tim Burton doesn’t really talk about the music until there is something to hear, rather he just shows the film to Elfman who then starts working on the score. Both of these approaches are things I’ve worked with in the past, with the two films I’m scoring for this project being a combination of the two. But even in the cases where the directors haven’t had so much idea as to where to go with the music, gaining an understanding of the film has been key to how I’ve gone about scoring the films. This also ties quite nicely into another concept which is that of thinking about the film, where as Zimmer puts you kind of “invent a language” for a film “once you’ve got it under your nails”. This is referring to something that I’ve found that helps a lot but may seem oddly counter productive and that is just letting the film sit in your mind for a while, thinking about it from time to time and gaining a vision for the film, allowing yourself the time to work out what it is you want to do, or can do and why it needs to be done for this particular film. On Immort for example, I produced some music back when it was an animatic which upon showing the director he wasn’t overly keen on. However, between that point and the point when I scored the film I thought about it a lot, not actually sure what I could do with the music. The ‘failure’ so to speak of the conceptual piece I produced earlier helped to point me in a direction and got me on the process of working out the tonality of the score and what it needed to for the film. This process continued as I saw rough cuts, looking at the aesthetic and acting, working out what music could add to the film, how it could be interpreted by the audience and whether that was suitable or not. All this meant that by the time I could start work on the score, I knew a good deal of what I wanted to do and upon working out instrumentation it was a matter of filling in the blanks I’d created for myself while I went through the thinking the film through stage. This is something that is re-iterated by Trent Reznor as well where he brings up the idea of inspiration often striking randomly and to do with something that might be going on at that time – an example of which is again in Immort’s score, the double bass lines, the idea for them came from me having watched The Hateful Eight and then the following day having a good idea involving double bass due to a piece of music I enjoyed from the film using the same instrument.
This is in relation to learning outcome one, relating to professional practice as a composer, including things such as those mentioned above and time management skills, working out how long to spend thinking about a film, experimenting with sounds and so forth before you actually need to start working on the music and how long you should then spend recording it. While this wasn’t touched on above, it plays an important part in the workflow process of a composer, with different composers having different routines and workflows, all dictated by the time allotted for the scoring of the film to take place.