chapter three

STARTING YOUR
SCORE: THE
SPOTTING SESSION
“We’re basically just starting and stopping.”

The first step in any scoring process is actually watching the film—getting an
instinctive feel for its rhythms, its tone, and the areas where music will play an
important role. Ideally you can find an informal way to do this before sitting
down to work—at a screening, public or private, or even in an editing booth,
where you can absorb the film as a complete work and react to it as a viewer.

Your first professional viewing of the movie will likely be in a spotting

session, which is usually held in a small screening room. During a spotting
session, you and the director can sit down and go through the film scene by
scene, making note of where music should start and stop, how long each cue
or combination of cues will be, and numbering each cue. Cues in the first
section of the film are numbered 1m1, 1m2, etc.:

• The first number indicates the reel, or section of the film, in which the
music will be placed.
• The m indicates music.
• The second number indicates the cue’s placement within the reel.

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LEARN MORE: ANNOTATING YOUR MUSICAL CUES

A reel refers to a reel of 35mm film, the industry standard medium before
most theaters switched to digital projection. Each reel consisted of 1,000 feet
of film, which would run for around 11 minutes before it had to be changed.
Movies are still measured in these 11-minute increments, and film score cues
are labeled accordingly. Therefore 1m1 would be the first piece of music in
a movie, 1m5 would be the fifth piece of music within that reel, 2m1 would
be the first piece of music in the second reel, etc. Pro tip: Giving each cue
a descriptive title—even if it’s just “Fight Scene”—will help you keep track of
what’s going on in the movie and the structure of your score.

COMMUNICATION IS KEY
One of the biggest challenges you might face in writing a film score is commu-
nicating with your director. The spotting session is your first opportunity
to formally discuss the director’s thoughts and feelings about what they want
from your music, and music can be a notoriously difficult thing to describe
and discuss (even for a composer). Some directors have musical experience,
but even if you can discuss musical terms in detail with the director, you may
not hit on exactly what they want out of a score. Discussing the feelings, the
intensity, perhaps the tempo—does your director want fast-paced music,
stately music, insistent music?—can often help indicate what the director
is looking for better than technical jargon. In some cases, a director may
be uncomfortable discussing anything about the film’s music, so it is your
responsibility to draw them out as much as possible at the spotting session.

NOW START WRITING

Once you’ve finished spotting, you can begin writing and planning. It’s been
a standard rule of thumb since the early days of motion picture scoring that
the average amount of music a composer can write is about two minutes per
day—less for particularly complex, note-heavy music and more for simpler,
more textural or lyrical writing. So conservatively, you’ll likely need at least 30
working days to write 60 minutes of music (on average, most films have about
60 to 70 minutes of music, but there is a wide range of variation).

As you write, you can also start to determine how many recording sessions
you will need. You may record a very simple television score in a day with
two three-hour sessions. At the other end is something like John Williams’s

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score for The Empire Strikes Back, which required 18 three-hour sessions spread
over two weeks. The Empire score was an elaborate, difficult-to-perform, and
lengthy score (with two hours and three minutes of music) and probably
represents the maximum amount of rehearsal and recording time a modern
movie score would use.

If you’re trying to gauge how many recording sessions you may need for your
own score, you’ll want to consider the caliber of musicians you’re working
with. If you’re recording in Hollywood with professional studio musicians,
you’ll find that they can generally execute a music cue to perfection in only a
couple of takes. But if you’ve written a particularly complex score or you’re
working with less experienced musicians, it will likely take longer to get the
usable takes you need. Better to estimate that you’ll need more time rather
than less. (For reference, Danny usually averages about eight to 10 minutes
of music per three-hour orchestra session, which includes separating instru-
ments like woodwinds and brass from the strings.)

LEARN MORE: FILM VS. DIGITAL

Virtually all movie theaters now use digital projection as opposed to film
reels, which predominated the industry prior to the 21st century. The reason
that film composers have worked around the “reel” system of determining
where music is placed in a film is due to the fact that reels of film once had to
be physically changed by projectionists, so music cues had to end just before
the end of a given reel. The next cue could not begin until the next reel was
playing. If you watch a physical film in a theater, you can often see a brief
white dot or flash in the corner of the screen just before a reel change—a
signal to alert the projectionist when to switch reels. (Yes, like in that one
scene from Fight Club.)

The standard for most theatrical films for many years was 35mm film—a frame
of film about 1⅓ inches wide. During the 1950s, as a tactic to deal with the
growing competition of television for viewing audiences, studios developed
larger film formats—65mm (frames a little more than 2½ inches wide) and
70mm (2¾ inches wide), which created a wider aspect ratio image with much
more detail, and which were also capable of holding much more sound infor-
mation in their magnetic “soundtracks.” This led to an era of wide-screen
epics like Ben-Hur, Spartacus, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as lavish motion
picture scores performed by large orchestras.

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Digital film has many advantages over analog film—you don’t have to protect
and load canisters of film, and you can do far more takes and shoot more
footage than you can practically shoot with film. Cinematographers will argue
the pros and cons of the final results of either medium, but digital film allows
for the manipulation of first-generation images as well as digital editing (not
to mention it’s more cost-effective). Certain directors—Quentin Tarantino is
one—still prefer the look and feel of analog film both for shooting and for the
final viewing experience.

TEMP MUSIC

“Temp music is the bane of every composer. Sometimes, I’m

looking at a rough preview, where there’s a full temp score
from beginning to end. And I hope never to see it again.”

Temporary scores, or temp scores, are compilations of music from other

sources—usually, but not always, from other movie scores—that are edited
to punctuate an early cut of a movie. At one time this was done just by film
editors, often to help provide a rhythm or outside structure to their cutting,
or to suggest the mood or feel of a scene before it has been scored. Sometimes
this can be done at the suggestion of a director, and in some cases it actually
indicates his or her ultimate goal for the music in the film. Probably the most
famous example of this is director Stanley Kubrick, who hired well-known
composer Alex North to score 2001: A Space Odyssey. But during filming, as
he began to assemble sequences, Kubrick used pieces of classical music like
Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,”
and the Adagio from the Gayane Ballet Suite by Aram Khachaturyan for various
scenes. Kubrick was eventually convinced that the classical pieces worked
better than North’s original pieces ever could. North didn’t realize that his
music was cut in favor of the classical recordings until the composer saw the
movie at its premiere. These days, temp music is generally used as a guideline
for composers.

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TEMP LOVE
Temporary music is meant to be just that: temporary. It’s almost never
intended to remain in the completed film, particularly as licensing rights
for specific pieces of music must be purchased (which can tack on exorbitant
costs). For the composer, a temp score may serve as a guide to what the film-
makers hope to achieve in terms of tone, tempo, and intensity for the final
score. The danger is that, in viewing the movie countless times with the temp
score in place, filmmakers can develop a case of “temp love”—and they’re loath
to kill their darling. In other words, a director is so used to seeing the movie
with its temp score in place that any new music written for the movie pales in
comparison, and the composer is strongly encouraged to more or less repro-
duce the music heard in the temp score.

That means you as a composer are consequently stuck in a double bind—

reproducing the temp score exactly is out of the question because of legal
and copyright issues, but failing to capture the aspects of the temp music
that please the filmmakers can put you out of a job. Maintaining strong
communication lines with your director and providing options for particu-
larly challenging moments increase the odds that your score will make it into
the film intact. But even well-known, established composers can struggle
to overcome a filmmakers’ affection for a temp track. For 1979’s Alien, Jerry
Goldsmith wrote a highly effective, avant-garde score—but the final cut of the
movie retained some temp music from Goldsmith’s 1962 score to Freud, and
Goldsmith’s end title music was replaced with music from Howard Hanson’s
Symphony No. 2 (“Romantic”), another piece of temp music preferred by the
filmmakers over Goldsmith’s original compositions.

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KEEP IT FRESH
Your options in dealing with temp music are either to slavishly reproduce
the temp track, creating music that is very similar but different enough to
avoid copyright issues, or create music that is so fresh and compelling that
you convince the director that yours is the perfect music for the movie. It’s
clear where Danny stands on this: “Your job,” he says, “is to come up with
something fresh and new. And yeah, there’s a certain point where the director
could beat you down by refusing your music two times, five times, seven
times, 10 times. But you try. You gotta try.”

Danny encourages being fierce but polite when it comes to expressing your
opinions to a director. “When you’re fierce with a director, you have to do
it in a very careful way, because if you just come off as arrogant and fiercely
attached to your own ways, the director’s gonna equally dig in,” he says. “And
you’re gonna end up coming to a real problem.”

When you’ve hit that crucial point with your director where they like the
way a piece of your music works with the film, you can use that as leverage to
convince them that a similar approach will work during other moments, or
that you can create a variation that will work in an equally effective way for
another scene in the film.

WORKING ON VARIOUS BUDGETS

“Scoring a film with big or small resources is

not even something I give two thoughts about. ...
You’re gonna encounter every kind of big, small,
in-between [budget] during your career.”

On a medium-size motion picture budget (somewhere between $10 million

and $25 million), you may plan for a 24-piece orchestra. For a small-budget
production (anything under $10 million), you may hire seven musicians for
two days of recording sessions, using three or four of the players as soloists on
one of those days. Often low-budget scores can be crafted with synthesizers

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and a soloist or two, but any group of players—whether it’s 16, 30, 64, or
90—will give you a different sound, and you must plan your score around the
capabilities of your musicians.

You will almost always be asked to create digital demos to audition cues
for filmmakers. If you’re creating demos for a score that will ultimately be
performed acoustically, you may need to reassure the filmmaker that demos
cannot create the expressive and emotional quality that live players provide
and that a whole new dimension to the score will be added when it is finally
performed by trained musicians. Action music and other hard-edged music
can often be expressed very effectively by synthesizer demos, but more roman-
tic or sentimental melodies require live performers to inject life and emotion.

PART OF THE PACKAGE

One aspect of budgets that has changed over the years is the use of package
deals, particularly on movies with midrange budgets. Since the early days of
movie scoring, composers would receive a separate set fee for their services,
which included conducting and overseeing the recording of their music, while
studio musician fees, recording studio costs, recording engineer fees, orches-
trators’ wages, and other wages were paid separately. Now, for movies with low
to midrange budgets, composers are often hired as part of a package—meaning
that the composer is paid an overall fee for the end-to-end production of the
score, from which costs for musicians, studio space, and any other workers
necessary to complete the score are derived.

As the composer, you are essentially paying all the costs of producing the
score out of your own pocket—meaning you may have to think about whether
you want to add to the production value of a score (reducing your take-home
pay in the process) or find ways to cut costs that won’t noticeably reduce the
quality of your score in order to keep your compensation equitable.

“There are great scores from small ensembles—from

inventive composers. And to show invention is a great thing.”

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