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.

As part of the trimester break’s activities, SAE Institute has offered a range of creative masterclasses tailored to the content students have been asking for. With the Bachelor of Songwriting and Music Production now on offer at SAE, it was the perfect time to dive into the world of scoring to film, with Stephen sharing his technical knowledge and creative decision making on his score for Andrew Huang’s Spacetime. Scoring the clip specifically for the event, to allow students to see the creative process on a clip they could score themselves, Steve walked them through the early steps of breaking up the scene into key focuses, developing the early sketch and motifs, fleshing out the track through orchestration and instrumentation, and finally polishing the track with music production techniques, like transitions, effects and mixing.

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.