With over 1200 scores submitted in total and over 400 within his division, Stephen O’Connell took home the 3rd Place Prize for his score to the short film I Catch You, a work by Four of Wands Productions. With a brief that called for a textural score, with less of a focus on melodic elements and more of a focus on supporting the emotion of the monologue, Stephen approached the score with minimal time to spare. Completing the score across two days, he managed to just submit in time for the competition. It was a surprise and delight when the competition results were announced some few months later in the year. He is incredibly grateful for the recognition and thanks everyone who took part in the organisation, participation and adjudication of the competition.

Stephen O’Connell from Cmd Shift New was brought on to produce an original score, the foley and sound design for the short film Out of Sight, written and directed by Shannon Brimelow. Along with Travis Hodgkinson from Epic Videos (a Cmd Shift New Partner), the production was a success, bringing the story to life with everyone’s hard work and efforts.

Orchestration isn’t just for those interested in classical music or film score. The concepts you can learn from orchestration affect all western music. Concepts like combining instrument textures across different octaves can be found in synthesis, for example. So how do you bridge the gap and make orchestration accessible?

Xperimenta Sounds recently released an amazing new free library, MINIMA, a collection of sampled sounds with ambient and curious textures. It was the culmination of an April fool’s joke that saw the company release a free “MinimaL” library with no sampled content, which some unlucky people who didn’t cotton on to the “minimal” hint fell for, downloading and installing the empty library. The very next day though saw the company release this incredibly diverse collection of warped and effected textures free for anyone to use, with Native Instruments Kontakt sampler.

When first breaking into the game, or when you start to branch out and contemplate that next purchase, it is a daunting task that awaits you, sifting through hours of YouTube videos of instrument walkthroughs and demos. It is easier nowadays to become paralysed when deciding on a sample library than by learning the DAW that controls them. So, how do you choose one library?

There honestly hasn’t been a better time to break into the world of music composition. With the advent of technology and the internet, there has been an abundance of music and a blurring of lines between styles, genres and the previous chasm that was the divide between professional and novice. As we head into the 3rd decade of the century, the availability and accessibility of quality compositional tools is only getting better, with so many options available to suit you from student to master.

As you begin your film score compositional journey, you may start out with no real idea of where to begin, but as you complete more and more projects a unique workflow that works for you will begin to appear. Nevertheless, there are some commonalities between composers, steps that we all inevitably land on, whether in the same order or not. Whether you maintain the workflow I share you with you or not, you may find value in some of the considerations below, helping you to fast track your next score or think outside what you have already completed to find new ways of expressing the film’s storyline.