Under the titles
Film composer-to-be Spencer Nunamaker, studying at Berklee, drops a hint as to how long it takes to put together a film score:
Typically, for most film composers in Hollywood, writing 2 minutes of music a day can be considered a success. With that in mind, one could reason that if you were scoring a typical 90-minute movie, you could probably expect to take 6-8 weeks to compose the music.
And, of course, you don’t get to start on those two minutes a day until the rest of the film is more or less completed. The schedule might go like this:
Week 1: The composer receives the rough cut, attends the spotting session, and the music editor prepares timing notes.
Weeks 2-5: Composing begins, gives rough copy of music to the orchestrator who orchestrates it, and sends to the copyist.
Weeks 7-8: Dubbing music with sound effects and dialogue.
Week 9: Film goes to lab for answer prints and color correction.
Week 12: Film is delivered to theaters for wonderful fun time for all.
I have no idea whether contemporary computerized tools are helping or hindering this process.
hatless in hattiesburg »
25 January 2010 · 1:25 pm
as someone who often uses those “contemporary computerized tools” (komplete, reaper, and other vst) to make music, i would say that they usually help the *process*. the benefit would be more obvious when the orchestration is complex, maybe not so much on a simple piano melody. whether or not it helps the *finished product* is a whole other question…
CGHill »
25 January 2010 · 10:13 pm
I’ve heard some pretty nice scores done on solo piano. (Low-budget art films, you know the type.)
I actually have some VST plugins for Audacity, in case I ever want to mess things up worse than I usually do.
nightfly »
26 January 2010 · 3:22 pm
If one is an in-demand composer, or just a musically-inclined person walking around with phrases in one’s head, how does it affect the process? I know that an interesting little riff isn’t a song, much less a score, but I’m guessing that composers typically have a few refrains that they’ve jotted down or tinkered with, one of which may serve as a jumping-off point for some commissioned work.
For example, I have scraps of stories with no home, and characters and plot concepts and snatches of dialogue simmering on my back burner all the time. (Sometimes they come to the front of the stove and out of my mouth as I walk along, which makes passersby just a little anxious!) If someone were to walk up and offer cash money if I could write them 20 or 25 pages, I would immediately think of those homeless scraps and see if one of them could be the core of a story.