Spitfire Audio Westworld Scoring Competition | The Joys and Complexities of Scoring to Film
Speaking as an experienced composer who has written for many different projects across so many styles, I’m going to say something you probably wouldn’t expect… Film score composition is hard (…but I love it!).
Not in an insurmountable way, it simply offers a far more involved workflow with a range of variables to consider that you may not ordinary even think about when putting pen to paper (or MIDI to DAW) in your compositions. What is your storyline and how does it support the film/clip? Are you getting in the way of the dialogue or detracting from the scene? What are the key timed events that you can support? Not only do these unusual compositional questions present themselves, but then further questions from the team you are working with come up, such as am I on the same page as the director or producer, did I interpret the scene correctly, and does the instrumentation match the aesthetic?
Unlike your normal composition method, which might find you tinkering with an idea on a piano and heading in whatever whimsical direction inspiration sees fit, film scoring is a collaborative effort that feels more like you are panning for gold as you juggle and problem solve your way through the film. This is why film scores are my favourite composition projects to work on, as it feels like it is a creative puzzle that you are not only putting together, but designing the puzzle pieces in the first place.
A recent composition challenge offered by the amazing team at Spitfire Audio, in collaboration with the hugely talented HBO team behind “Westworld”, gave me a chance to compose to a popular and high quality mainstream production and provide you with an insight into some of the joys and complexities of film score composition.
Working Through the Film Score
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.
Choose Your Tools
A quick “pre first step” first step is to consider what you want to utilise in your film score process. This may feel like an arbitrary question that has no real bearing on the final outcome, but I can assure you that this is as important of a question as what instruments you should use or what key you will compose in (if indeed you will be using instruments and keys). As someone who has conducted researched into the impact writing tools can have on a compositional process, I can let you know that the tools you choose will be more directional toward certain styles and textures than others.
There are many ways you may go about your compositional journey, but two of the most common tools used in the compositional workflow these days are musical notation/notation software and Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). Each of their respective values can be boiled down to a key difference in their function. DAWs capture a unique performance and can play that performance back. Notation, on the other hand, is simply a written direction on what to play and with occasional suggestions on how to play it, with limited playback methods (especially on paper). Initially, it may seem clear to you on which one you would choose, but there are several points to consider. While I won’t go in depth on the topic of compositional tools and workflows now, I will give a few examples of what to consider when starting your composition.
DAWs offer the unique opportunity, for the first time in musical history, of controlling nearly ever sound, tone and musical expression you could think of. You can hear an orchestra, a world music group or a rock band play back the same composition if you wanted to. Your options are virtually endless which can allow you to create an exact replication of your film score. This is very advantageous if your outcome is to produce an example of your work or a final recording yourself, mixed and ready for the film’s audio postproduction team to add to the film’s dialogue, Foley and sound design. However, a cautionary tale for you. Many a composer has found themselves composing their piece around the very sound of that specific library’s instrument, rather than developing the piece for the instrumentation that will record it. Why is that a problem? If your piece relies heavily on the sound of 20 double basses, you may be in for a disappointment when the orchestra plays your piece and it lacks the power you thought it had. Avoid composing a “performance” of your piece and allow for the inevitable change that may happen if your piece is to be recorded with musicians in the future.
Musical notation can avoid this issue on paper, but you may not avoid it through computer notation software, as it plays back your compositions for you, often with a far more hideous MIDI sample than available to you in DAWs. The benefit of music notation, though, is it can be very fast when jotting down those fleeting ideas before you forget them forever. Just as you might write down a shopping list to avoid forgetting everything you need for dinner, notation is there for your musical memos. The downside? Of course, with written directions, you can’t hear your composition as you imagine them. Music notation is simply an instruction manual for future musicians/computer programs to interpret your piece, meaning someone may play it differently to what you intended. Also, have you ever attempted to notate sound effects, non-musical textures or changes in synth settings? It can be incredibly difficult to correctly represent that on paper.
With my film score in the video above as an example, I predominantly used a DAW as my intention was to create a complete final track to present as my submission, but I did use notation to take note and develop my initial motifs. You will find your own workflow, utilising what you are comfortable and familiar with. At the end of the day, you will understand what you need to make this process as seamless and uninterrupted as possible for you.
Laying the Foundation and Identifying Impact Points
Naturally, the first step many will consider in scoring to film is to view the film first, understand the storyline and message and start to make decisions around how you will structure your score. The larger the film, the longer this first step will take, as it is important not to just start writing from the beginning and see what happens. If you took this approach, you may find yourself reaching the end and then going back to the beginning to rewrite the first half of the movie with your newly refined ideas from the second half.
Look for common themes, characters, locations and storylines throughout the film and identify them in your DAW or by pen and paper. Try to isolate the moods throughout the film too, noting what sections are faster and what sections are more emotive. By using this “broad strokes” approach initially, you will become more familiar with the film and start matching sections together that are tied by a common theme or pace, allowing you to experiment with similar motifs in these sections. When approaching this film clip, I used a DAW to import the movie file and I created markers to outline the sections I saw within the clip. I jotted down time codes for important mood changes and used a notebook to write out the storyline and emotive journey I wanted to take the audience on. These impressions and early structures helped me make decisions around tempo, moods and textures and later influenced my decisions on motifs and musical ideas.
You will also want to pay attention to key moments in the film that you can help support or get creative with. As an example in my work above, as the character Dolores uses the butt of the gun to knock through the sunroof on the car, I timed my composition to end one section decisively on the first hit and then restart the piece on the final hit that goes through the sunroof. It helped to emphasise the percussive sounds heard in the film’s location with the percussive sounds in my composition, making the moment more significant and impactful. You will hear a number of these timed passages throughout the clip as they help to embed the music in the world of the film.
Developing Motifs, Considering Instrumentation and Stitching the Piece Together
The way I approached scoring this film clip was to firstly understand the film’s storyline and then to follow that with an experimentative writing session where I played around with ideas for melody lines and motifs that I could use to support the film’s story. Motifs are short musical phrases or ideas that can be developed into full sections or pieces, kind of like the building blocks for your piece. These motifs can help identify characters or express moods in the film and can even be used to set the scene or mood before an event happens.
I like to develop multiple motifs, jotting them down on musical notation, so I have a few sketches to choose from when placing them in the score. It helps to experiment later with placement and instrumentation, and focus only on the motifs to begin with, giving you something to work with later. These sketches can be brief or a little more fleshed out, but they are essentially just ideas to later experiment with, so you don’t need every detail worked out and every intent realised just yet. The key here is to ensure that the motif does reflect the mood and story you want to convey with the film, as this will help you mould the motif later into the film score.
Motifs don’t have to be overly complex or purely musical either. There are plenty of scores that use a more textural approach to some of their main themes, such as Hans Zimmer’s work on the Batman Trilogy, where there were minutes of a simple wall of strings very slowly rising in pitch. Indeed, in the world of television scores, this more textural approach to music is often heard, an example is Ramin Djawadi’s HBO scores for Game of Thrones and Westworld where long suspenseful textures are often used to support the dialogue of an intense scene. This can be just as effective in eliciting the target emotive response you want and should never be ruled out of the experimentation phase if it can in any way gel with your film’s storyline.
This frame of mind should be used when you turn to instrumentation. Scores are no longer restricted to the purely orchestral. As digital music making became more influential and our world became more digital, it became common to hear electronic inspired and texture based scores to new films and TV series. This opens up new possibilities and makes way for digitally created scores, such as the one I have created for this film clip that merges traditional orchestra instruments with harsher electronic percussion lines and textured sounds. As long as an instrument’s texture fits the aesthetic of the film and doesn’t detract from the storyline, it should be explored and maybe used
PRO TIP: You want to develop a good rapport with your director or producer and start showing them early sketches and ideas to check in with them on how your creative visions are lining up. This can help reduce workload by weeding out the motifs that don’t work early on. Be warned though, this does rely on open communication with your film team and on a director or producer who can see your early sketch with the vision you see it too. Sometimes, if you show something that is too raw and undeveloped, there is a tendency to dismiss it simply because it sounds bad, not because it doesn’t have the potential.
Once you have the motifs and have decided on the instrumentation for them, you can start placing them into your composition against the film clip, lining them up with the film’s storyline. Sometimes motifs will need to be repeated or extended, sometimes they will need to be shortened, but this is the stage where you start to make the motifs and ideas fit the timing of the film you are working on. Adjusting the DAW session and tempo to fit these sections and line up your motifs correctly can be a big help in achieving this step and Christian Henson from Spitfire Audio shows a quick way you can achieve this in his chosen DAW, Logic Pro X.
Adding Embellishments
After creating the bedrock of your piece with motifs and building it into a full piece by stitching these blocks together, now is the time to explore what else can be added to your piece for extra flavour. As always, all embellishments can’t detract from the film viewing experience or draw the attention away from the storyline, but embellishments can provide useful emphasises and variety to your piece, helping to keep it exciting and engaging.
These embellishments can be of a more musical nature, with runs or trills in instruments being obvious examples. However, there are other embellishments, such as those I’ve used in this film score, that are more textural in nature. A “riser” is often a term you will hear in EDM music production, often referring to a synth note or pattern that is rising in pitch or intensity just before a big hit in the track at a pinnacle moment. You can use textures like these to emulate rise and hit motions in your piece, as I have done throughout this film score when transitioning between mood changes.
In my piece you will hear swells, hits, feedback pitches and metallic noises that rise in volume and then hit and decay away on a change in camera angle or strong beat. This helps strengthen a transition and embed the music into the location by using similar textures in your music as what’s found in the film audio, just as we did when considering impact points in the film clip. As with every decision, the embellishments aim to strengthen the story line and gel the music with the film to avoid distracting the audience.
Tips for the Film Composer
Beyond the loose workflow structure above, there are some helpful “guidelines” that can keep you on track with your film score and ensure you don’t overpower the very film you are trying to support.
“Don’t become too attached to an idea…”
It is inevitable that there will be a situation where we will become attached to the musical motifs and ideas that we consider to be our very own masterpieces, but our director or producer will not.
It is hard to let ideas go, especially if you are proud of them or have spent a long time creating them, but not every idea will pan out and make it to the final cut. After all, the way we see the film and what we believe will support it best is based on our interpretation of the film. It is the job of the director or producer to ensure that the creative vision, aesthetic and storyline are consistent throughout with the message that is being conveyed in the film, so let them make that call and encourage them to really consider your work and rip it apart where needed to remould it within their view.
I want you to remember two things when faced with resistance to your composition from a stakeholder in the project; 1) This is not a personal dig at your professionalism, understanding of the project or (most importantly) with your compositional skills, and 2) you are one of a team of people who will deliver the final product. Remaining objective and open to ideas and playing with the team to achieve that end goal is far better than clinging to your composition and risking the entire project’s outcome.
“You must make the bricks your house will be built from…”
Whether you are writing for a small video clip or a feature film, naturally you are starting with a blank canvas, or a blank concrete slap (if you will) on which you will build your house. Just like the houses you see around you every day have different sizes and shapes for their foundations, the film to which you will compose to will have various scenes, some long and some short, with different characters, moods and locations. With this in mind, a smarter, faster and more productive method would be to decide what your bricks (your melodies/motifs) will look like and then start building your house from there.
By developing short and small motifs, you can create an arsenal of sketched ideas that are ready to be pulled out and expanded to fit the scene or passage in the film. Often characters or moods will change so fast that you could find yourself out of sync with the film if you develop on an idea too long, but by having small sketches that you can drop in and then stitch together into a piece for the full scene (not unlike laying bricks to build the side wall of your house) it allows you to be far more flexible around fast-paced scenes, have your musical “character motifs” or other key motifs play when certain characters and events appear on screen, and develop a full score that supports the storyline more cohesively.
A perfect case study of this idea of recalling small blocks of musical motifs and building entire scores around them would be John Williams’s score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It would be near impossible to discuss film scores without at least once mentioning the film score legend and veteran, John Williams, as his scores have brought to life many of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters. This is in part due to John Williams’s mastery of character motifs, being able to seamlessly gel small melodies that are tied to characters and events together into a single piece that reflects the storyline so well.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a unique stand out to me personally, as he skilfully pulls original Star Wars motifs written decades ago and new motifs for the latest characters together and manages never to lose any cohesion in his score. A perfect example would be the scene where Rey and Kylo duel together towards the end of the movie, where Kylo’s theme, Rey’s theme and the Force’s theme can all be heard at various moments, interwoven with each other depend on what is visually in focus and what the story is displaying.
“No need to flex, bro…”
We all know composers who relish in the idea of flexing those creative muscles and showing off how amazing they are at creating complex and intricate works that challenge performers and listeners alike. This isn’t an inherently bad trait to have; after all, music is music and intricate ideas are just as powerful as simple ones. However, this peacocking can have a negative side effect. Your piece suddenly becomes the centre of the film clip, drawing the attention away from the story and the characters and on to the music.
When you think back to the films you love, you can probably hum their theme tunes or title music instantly, but can you do that to the entire score? Sometimes, you barely notice what the music is doing, only what feeling it is giving you. That is actually the perfect quality in film music, where the audience becomes so immersed in the storyline that they don’t notice the music directly. It shows that the music has gelled perfectly with the film’s storyline, going hand in hand with the actors’ performances to create an emotive journey that tells a cohesive story.
So, if you are sitting there wondering if your music should have been more complex, showy and bold, you are asking yourself the wrong question. Instead, ask if that is what the story calls for. The story is the true guide and will ultimately make the decision for you.
Wrapping Up
Ultimately, there can be no right or wrong in music making. It all comes down to the film, the creative vision and team behind it… and you. Some scores will always stand out more than others for their timelessness or finesse, but if you live by the simple rule that the story comes first, it is hard to falter too much in realising your film scoring dreams.