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Really good post & a great insight into your working methods. How does the time pressure effect your writing or can you negotiate more time if needed (I expect probably not!)? I can't wait to hear more!
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#12
Posted 18 January 2010 - 10:28 AM
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Hi Newport, I'm glad you're finding it insightful!
Great question about the time — I'm going to discuss time pressures more extensively in the next post, which should be going up in a day or two so hang tight and I'll address schedules and time pressures at some length.
Great question about the time — I'm going to discuss time pressures more extensively in the next post, which should be going up in a day or two so hang tight and I'll address schedules and time pressures at some length.
Marius Masalar
Composer | Writer
www.mariusmasalar.me
Composer | Writer
www.mariusmasalar.me
#13
Posted 22 January 2010 - 07:58 PM
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PART 2
A Week in Afghanistan
So that was a fun week. I am delighted and not a little bit relieved to report that I have finally finished this little 4-minute cue, and now that I've done so I'm back to bring you up to speed on what's been going on since my last post in terms of workflow and also to address some of the questions and comments that you've all been so kind to leave for me.
I hesitate to use the word "finished", in fact, since really all I've done is complete the mock-up of the score and deliver it to the director for approval. At any rate, I'm relieved to have gotten this far because the clip itself is so raw and gritty that I found myself struggling to address it without ruining the mood. It's very evocative and powerful footage and so a lot of the time, the score is just barely commenting. To fill you in a bit more (as promised) about the premise of this clip, it's essentially the final 4 minutes of what will one day be a feature-length film about a soldier taken prisoner in Afghanistan and guarded by a teenage boy, brought back from his life in Canada to serve the Taliban. The two form something of a strange and almost friendly relationship over the course of the soldier's captivity, because the boy was unaware that his captive had been the sniper who had killed members of his family. This final terribly vivid sequence is the boy's right of passage: the Taliban notice his kindness toward the soldier and order the boy to kill his prisoner as a display of loyalty and maturity. Where we pick up the thread is with the two of them out in the desert, playing out this final confrontation.
The editing is brilliantly sharp, and the performances are solid too, so the combined effect is about as dry and un-theatrical as you can get. Which makes it a challenge to score effectively.
Lucky for me, I enjoy challenges. In this case, I had several ideas for how to address the clip, and I began by running a few of them by the director to see which concept seemed to resonate most strongly with him. In the end, this ended up being something of a "word" score. I just made that up, so don't go jotting it down as an industry term. What I mean to say by it though is that it's a score that's very much rooted in or represented by a single word or concept. Something that it evokes and continues to revisit. In this case, the word that the director and I found ourselves throwing around a lot was "inevitability". Specifically, the inevitability of the soldier's fate and guilt for the murder of the boy's loved ones. There are some poignant exchanges of dialogue where the soldier attempts to reason with his captor, telling him that he's just a boy and should forget Afghanistan and just go back to Canada and live his life, but — inevitably — there's too much pain to forget and walk away from.
Nice and fluffy stuff, needless to say.
Back to the Drawing Board
In theory, that sounds fine and dandy, but in practise the challenge was actually quite something and I re-started this score no less than three times before I finally settled on what I feel is a sound that not only captures the emotional and dramatic content of the imagery, but also stays the hell out of its way so that I don't end up cheapening or parodying the experience of watching the film. Three times.
There is a specific scene where there's a brief scuffle between the two of them as the soldier attempts to wrestle the gun away from the boy, and it happens about a minute into the 4-minute clip. That part was actually the crux of the film, from a scoring perspective, because I found that once I finally found out how to address that combat without being too over-the-top or too out of the way, the rest came much more naturally. For me, I find that this is often the case for a score where I do not immediately have a solution. I end up struggling until I figure out one specific part that's particularly annoying, and once I figure that part out the rest seems to just come through from there.
This is a good place to discuss something that has a huge impact on the scoring process but that isn't always consciously recognized: the editing.
Cut and Dried
As a film student, I have a keen appreciation for the other aspects of film-making beyond my own musical niche. Editing is the process of cutting together the raw footage and arranging it into the experience we call a film. I find that in many cases, editing is the most similar of the other disciplines to music because it too relies heavily on rhythms and must take into account the emotional arcs of the drama and address the precise amounts of time necessary to produce a final scene. The editor is the guy/gal who decides which facial expressions we end up focusing on, and therefore which emotions are in the forefront and for how long. They are without a doubt the only other folks on the post-production team with quite as much direct emotional manipulating power as us composers.
I bring this up to help explain why the fight scene was a challenge to score. The combat scene was the stickler here for me because it wasn't at all a Hollywood-style action scene. There was no freaky Kung Fu going on, no spectacular effects....just two guys brawling awkwardly in the desert. That meant that I couldn't approach it as a standard action scene — indeed the level of tension is so high throughout the clip that it was almost as if I didn't even need to treat it differently at all. In the end, I had three primary approaches that I tried. The first was a percussion-only take on it that had a great sense of motion and energy but just felt too heavy-handed and overwrought. I experimented with many many different percussion instruments and combinations thereof to try and hit some sort of sweet spot, but to no avail.
Then I tried to leave it way quiet and just let the atmosphere and combat noises carry the sequence. That worked, but it also made that fight stick out from the whole sequence as a drop in energy. Had it been on its own, I'm fairly certain that I would have left that scene without any music. It seemply didn't need it. However, since it was part of a larger sequence, I had to be conscious of the full experience and ensure that I came up with a coherent score.
Therefore, what I ended up with was a sound-design based approach that really sounds nothing like a "combat" sequence in the traditional understanding of the term, but it fits the visuals quite well in my estimation. I wish I could show you, but I can't for now, so in the meantime...
The Four-Minute Fruit of My Labour
At this point, I'm going to show you exactly what I've showed the director: the mock-up of the whole score. Sadly I can't show it to you with the film clip, but you can at least hear the kind of sound that I'm going for and try to imagine what kinds of visuals it might apply to. The fight sequence though, for reference, occurs between 0:45 and 1:00, so you can keep that in mind when you get there:
Look Me In The Eyes (Mock-Up v.1)
It's interesting to hear how essentially unimpressive that 4 minutes sounds on its own. I can fully understand how someone would have trouble imagining me spending several hours throughout the week making that, but it's important to keep in mind that while it certainly isn't very complex musically, it takes time and consideration to come up with those sounds and arrange them in such a way as to complement and support such challenging footage. If I had been chosen to work with a different director, perhaps I would have something far more lush and musical to show you, but as it is I'm working on a much more challenging film and so the music is appropriately challenging as well.
Of course, don't take my word for it just like that — It's time to take a look at my Logic environment and take you through what it meant to actually produce this track from a technical perspective.
It's All Very Logical
My Logic template for this project was about 70 tracks in size, of which only 40 or so were actively used. The others were things I had experimented with or otherwise brought in "just in case". It's good to be prepared when you're working on something like this, a challenging project, because if you have a wide palette of sounds right at your fingertips, you can try and play around with seemingly random ideas and spark inspiration from there. If I had to search and load every time I had a crazy idea, it would slow me down and stifle the creative process. Rather than show you my entire Logic template, which would make for a fairly gigantic and unwieldy screenshot, I'm going to show you a shot of what my screen looks like at any given moment, with no scrolling or anything (this is a screenshot across two 23' monitors by the way, so it's still pretty hefty):
What you're looking at is basically a few MIDI segments. The horizontal gray lines are the actual notes, with their height/length corresponding to relative pitch/duration, and the white veritcal lines are any and all other MIDI CC data (mostly MOD and Expression). There are also some vertical gray lines on the string harmonics track, and that's just pitch-bending. You'll notice that I chose to stick to one constant tempo rather than change things up all over the place. I did this for two reasons: first of all, it's easier to get an ensemble to perform everything accurately when you're not bombarding them with a schizophrenic click track, and more importantly I had the good fortune of being subject to a talented editor whose rhythm of cuts pretty precisely adhered to a tempo of 101BPM or so.
Once I had the template set up (it was basically a modified version of my full orchestral template, including some more eclectic instruments), I screwed around with the mix settings a bit to change up the space since I needed some more reverb on some elements than I would normally have. From that point forward, I played in all the MIDI data live via MIDI keyboard and occasionally went back for second and third takes if I'd made a mistake or if I had to add in more CC data than I could with a single hand at a time. So for example if I had a string line, I might have had to record the notes and MOD data on one pass and then Expression and pitch wheel on another.
Now let's take a look at the mixing deck:
As you can see, most of the instruments are just loaded into Kontakt instances, one per general instrumental section. You'll have to forgive my poor labeling, but essentially the instances go Woodwind Long Articulations, Woodwind Shorts & FX, Brass Long Articulations, Brass Shorts & FX, etc etc. Within each Kontakt instance, I've loaded up to 16 individual patches. Here's a glimpse at the Brass Long Articulations:
You'll notice that all the pan settings are done on a per-instrument-patch basis rather than by section. Just gives that extra bit of precision. Within each K4 instance, I've loaded up instruments that would be placed in the same general area on the soundstage. This is for reverb purposes. Back on the mixing deck, you'll notice that each instance of K4 has 2 SpaceDesigner modules loaded on it. SpaceDesigner is a convolution reverb plugin (the one built in to Logic, it's brilliant and efficient) so the first handles the early reflections, and the second one handles the tail of the reverb. Here are the reverb settings for that Brass instance (left side is the early reflections, right side is the tail, I've just stuck them side by side):
The label above the waveform diagram is the name of the impulse response I'm using (in this case it's from a scoring stage called Todd-AO), and the only other significant element is the Dry/Rev sliders on the right side which control how much of the signal is the original "dry", or unprocessed, sound and how much is the "Rev" or wet processed sound. In other words, it's controlling the ratio of signal to reverb. More reverb and less signal makes things sound further back, the reverse obviously makes them sound closer up. In combination with some basic EQing, this is the basics of how one achieves the illusion of depth in a mix.
That's a basic overview of the technical end of the process, so without delving into more potentially boring details, I'll flit over to the Q&A part of this post where I discuss the various questions or comments you've brought up!
Q & A
Actually the only major thing I have to address here that wasn't covered somewhere in the post was Andy's comment about the schedule and Newport's related question about the pressure. Remember in the first post I mentioned that these deadlines are ridiculous? That's because typically, in film work, one gets used to some...shall we say retarded expectations. I've had a couple of occasions now where I've been expected to churn out a half-hour's worth of fully produced score in less than two weeks. That's with me being a full-time student. Full-time composers often find themselves dragged into the process way late, sometimes to replace another composer, and they have totally impractical expectations placed on them. It's part of the job and it is a lot of pressure. Depending on the person, that's either extremely motivational or a total turn-off, and I'm sure there are many composers out there who have forfeited a career in film because they simply could not deal with the various things including time pressures that are part of the job. I won't bother citing more horror stories because you can find them all over the internet on composer blogs, forums, and other gathering places. The point I'm getting at is that me having so much time between milestones of this project is ridiculous in the opposite direction — it's a blessing that I have sooo much time to comfortably develop this score, rather than having to get it all done in a day and orchestrated the next for recording on the third day.
Newport, the time pressure in my case is a motivational thing. Sometimes it's truly ridiculous and I feel bad because it means that I may not have produced my best possible work, but the way I look at it is that the director is the one who's landed me in this position, and I make sure they're aware of what things look like from my perspective. It's only fair since some of them have very little concept of what film scoring entails. Thankfully, once they do, they're almost always much more lenient and understanding about making sure composers are given plenty of time and resources to get the job done. As for negotiating more time, I'm pretty much locked into the scheduled dates, but again, since they're so far apart I'm really not feeling the pressure too much. The only reason I even considered it was because I have two schools, another film, and two game projects going simultaneously.
Next Steps
Now we wait.
Until the director gets back to me with edit requests or an okay, the score is out of my hands and I get to relax a bit (read: work on other things). My hope is that I've realized his vision well enough that there won't be many edits, but it's entirely possible that he'll need the whole thing redone with a radically different approach. It happens, and I can only be thankful that there's enough time to handle that if it happens to be the case. Assuming I get the okay though, my next week will basically be a process of transcribing the Logic session into my Sibelius template and preparing the parts. Tedious, but necessary since I actually have a real ensemble to work with in this case. For reference, in many Hollywood studio settings, this is about the point where I, as the composer, would hand off my session to my team of MIDI transcriptionists, orchestrators, and copyists, and they would get to handle the comparatively dull tasks while I would go on to the next cue. In my case, there is no team, and there aren't any cues left for this project, so I get to do the fun part myself. Just as it should be, by the way. If one can't because of time constraints, I understand, but as far as I'm concerned, a composer should do his own work — even the dull stuff — whenever possible.
Thanks for reading through again, and I hope you've learned some new things. If you've got more questions, feel free to fire them off and I'll do my best to answer them either directly or in the next post, which will cover the transcription process and the preparation of the actual orchestral score.
Until then, take care!
Quick Links:
PART 1
PART 3
Marius Masalar
Composer | Writer
www.mariusmasalar.me
Composer | Writer
www.mariusmasalar.me
#14
Posted 24 January 2010 - 12:59 PM
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Thanks again for sharing this with us. As you say, it is difficult to listen to it without the pictures. I felt the build-up to the fight scene built the tension well (I shut my eyes & let my imagination fill it in). The subtle "pitch bend" on some of the parts added to the sense of something was going to happen! It's difficult to fully assess the piece after the initial combat sequence starts without really knowing what was happening in the film. I thought the effects sounded good - I assume they are bass heavy for the 'cinema' sound? It's interesting to see how you worked on the piece, I'm still working my way through it (I could sure do with a couple of 23" monitors for my setup!) Thanks for answering my question on time pressures. I suppose in a way, having a limited time focuses the mind on the job - the option of 'I'll do it when I feel like it' doesn't really exist! I hope the director likes what he hears - I look forward to the next installment. Good luck!
#15
Posted 28 January 2010 - 02:11 PM
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Learning composer
This is one of the most amazing threads I've ever seen - thanks so much for sharing your journey Marius!
I have a few questions about the Guild of Canadian Film Composers. You said you were part of a program, is that a special program or did someone come up to you through the search and chose you for their film (I just searched action/drama/theatrical/video games/orchestral and you came up
)
Also, that program that you use, Logic, is it what you compose on as well as edit, or just editing?
Finally, I was telling my mom about this, and she would like to know which school you go to for film composing, do you mind sharing?
I have a few questions about the Guild of Canadian Film Composers. You said you were part of a program, is that a special program or did someone come up to you through the search and chose you for their film (I just searched action/drama/theatrical/video games/orchestral and you came up
)Also, that program that you use, Logic, is it what you compose on as well as edit, or just editing?
Finally, I was telling my mom about this, and she would like to know which school you go to for film composing, do you mind sharing?
- Impresario
#16
Posted 02 February 2010 - 04:26 PM
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PART 3
The Tedium of Transcriptions
Hi guys!
Pardon my recent silence, but it's been a busy busy week. Let's recap: up to this point, I've taken you through the spotting and mock-up production steps of the process. Cool. When I last left you, I had completed my mock-up and was waiting for my director to get back to me with a yea or nay. Happily, I got both thumbs way up so a couple of days after my last post, I was working on the next stage in the process, which is arguably the least exciting. As I've mentioned, I do my writing and sequencing primarily in Logic (as I described in the last post) and my notation in Sibelius 6. I used Finale up until this year, and there's a thread elsewhere on this board where I explain why I ended up switching to Sibelius. It's not really relevant to this thread. This is a shorter segment, so let's jump right in and then I'll answer the questions that popped up!
The Trouble With Timecode
So with my mock-up done and my director's approval, the next step was to make it all friendly for the real players that would be performing it. That means a score and parts. There are several ways I could have gone about this, the most direct being importing my MIDI file from Logic into Sibelius and then cleaning it up. Call me masochistic, but I've never been able to get a notation program to import a MIDI file without first chewing it up and barfing it out in a barely-recognizable form, so instead I decided I would just transcribe it all manually.
You've already seen my template, so all that this process consisted of was flipping between Logic and Sibelius and getting all the music transcribed nicely into an actual score file. One of the joys of using a notation program instead of writing scores by hand or via LilyPond or similar is the concept of linked parts. Once I've transcribed the full score, all the parts are already automatically generated for me. Sure, they occasionally have some wonky dynamics placements and I have some spacing issues to fiddle with, but by and large it (and the wonder that is Sibelius' Magnetic Layout feature) saves metric shit-tones of time and nerves.
If there's one thing that's annoying as hell to set up in terms of score, it's the timecode markings. See, timecode is this odd and terrifying monster that causes problems in a subtle, cancerous sort of way. The timecode will vary depending on the framerate of the film clip you're given...whether it's 24fps (frames per second) or 29.98, etc....and sometimes the framerate of the quicktime you're given to score doesn't match the final. Not only that, but in order to make sure everything is comfortably synced on the scoring stage, the program director recommended actually starting the music on measure 3 of the score. Which means I have to convince Sibelius to have negative timecode for those first two measures. Of course, I then have to export a MIDI tempo map for the session, and the General MIDI standard doesn't support negative timecodes so you have to, in the session, shift things over to compensate and set up ProTools so that it starts the video at measure 3 and timecode 00:00:00:00 instead of measure one....
Confused yet? Yeah, welcome to my weekend. Long story short though, it's all settled and working properly, which is a bit of a relief. It's pretty easy to understand, having gone through this, why the big Hollywood guys hire other people to handle this crap for them. If only, if only.
Dots and Lines
Of course, before I could actually set up the parts, I first was required to submit my score to an "orchestration mentor" — basically a local working composer who provided some feedback and suggestions for not only making the best of the ensemble, but also presenting it on the page in such a way as to make it as clear, succinct, and direct as possible for the musicians. "They will play exactly what's on the page. Seriously, M, make sure what you write is precisely what you want to hear," he kept reminding me. Good call.
After I implemented and tweaked and otherwise polished the score according to the suggestions provided my my mentor, I was ready to prep the parts and get everything ready for printing. For the session, it's basically one single-sided A4 part per two players, plus an extra just in case. Then at least 3 double-sided A4 stapled booth scores, and a tabloid-size conductor's score on cardstock (so that it doesn't make a giant rustling noise when the conductor turns the page. It's the little things...) The lady at Kinko's was rather perplexed, so I made a separate page with instructions just to make sure I got what I wanted. Kudos to them for a perfect job though. Incidentally, tabloid-sized scores are larger than you think. They're terribly awkward to transport, I've discovered.
Session Preparation, and Preparation Session
This is not always done, but in the case of most people who want to have a successful recording session, it's important to have a prep session before the musicians are on the clock. Musicians are very expensive, so you don't want to have problems with your files causing you to eat into your recording time. Basically for a recording session, we were required to have the following items:
- Score & Parts
- Audio Click Track
- MIDI Tempo Map
- Audio Pre-Records (Pre-Lays, etc)
The MIDI Tempo Map is a format 0 MIDI file (as opposed to format 1...essentially it means all data is on one track instead of many). The point of this MIDI file is so that it can be imported into ProTools (in the case of this and most other recording studios) so that the program can automatically follow the precise tempo parameters of your sequence. So, for instance, if you change tempo 5 times in a cue, instead of having to manually screw with the tempo track in ProTools and set up each tempo change, you can just import the tempo map and — voila! — all done. Time saver.
Last item on the list refers to my audio prelays. A Pre-Lay, or Pre-Record is essentially an audio file of anything that's in my sequence that will not be played by the instrumentalists live. In my case, it's about 4 tracks of synthetic ambience and heavily processed percussion and other instruments. Each prelay is typically a stem; in other words, it only contains one or a few instruments rather than having all the extra sounds on one track. This is to give you and the mixing engineer ultimate control of adjusting the levels of each individual element of a cue in the mix. All these prelays, and actually the click track as well, must be rendered in fully uncompressed BWAV at 24bits (48kHz). Big files, maximum quality product.
The Recording Session
About 3 hours ago, I finished up the prep session at the studio (it's the Glenn Gould Studio in the CBC Headquarters in downtown Toronto if anyone's interested) so now my ProTools session is all set up with the prelays and click track, and is all properly synced to the video file so that when the baton falls, everything is in place and there's no wasted time. That magical time is actually just about an two hours and a bit from right now, but I decided to take this break time in between to have lunch and update this thread a bit. I'm taking pictures, as are some of the others, so hopefully I can share those in the next post as we approach the final mixing session on the 11th of February.
Just to remind you, the orchestra is a selection of 26 musicians from the Royal Conservatory of Music's orchestra here in Toronto (it's basically a prestigious music-focused teaching institution), and we were recently told that about 20 emerging local film-makers as well as the president of the GCFC and some other members will be attending the session. There is also a collective networking outing at a nearby pub scheduled for after the recording, so it's going to be a long night! For now though, let me wrap this installment up by addressing the feedback.
Q & A
Newport, yes the mix is fairly bass-heavy but it's actually not so much because I was going for the "cinema" sound. I decided to have the bass frequencies fairly prominent because there's a great deal of tension that can be elicited using nothing but a very very low frequency drone. It's unsettling because you feel it more than you hear it, and it's a brilliant effect — used judiciously, of course — for a score with requirements like this one. The monitors are actually a lot more useful than you might think...somehow, having all that extra screen real-estate to work with seems to have a huge effect on the efficiency of one's workflow. It allows you to keep everything you need to see on screen at once and be able to avoid the clutter of trying to fit everything on a single screen. Having splurged for the multi-monitor setup, I can easily say that I'd never want to go back to one. Even a big one.
Impresario, I'm pleased you found the thread informative! The GCFC is a guild, so essentially it's like a proto-union that represents and tries to protect the rights of composers of film and media music working in Canada. You pay a nominal yearly fee for membership, and it gets you access to a bunch of events, discounts, and special programs — like this one. The way this particular program works is like a competition in that the GCFC sends out an email asking for submissions. The submission was basically a one-page letter of introduction/intent, a 3-minute example of your best work, and any random score (notation) that you'd produced. Basically a demonstration of the fundamental skills required to make the best of the program. It's geared toward serious emerging professional composers who just haven't had much experiece working with live orchestras before. It's so that we can learn the ins and outs of the process for when we actually have the budgets from a project to afford this. Anyway, so I was not eligible for the program since I was too young and still in school, but I sent an email to the coordinator and he liked my work enough that he said I was welcome to submit my application and that the jury would decide. And here we are, so thank you, jury. Just goes to show though: don't let anything stand in your way. Perseverance, initiative, and enthusiasm really go a long way.
Yes, Logic is what I compose in. I basically do everything except notation in Logic, including writing, sequencing, and mixing/mastering. It's my one-stop shop. You can tell your mother that I have absolutely no formal training in film scoring whatsoever. In fact, the extent of my formal musical education is piano lessons since I was younger. Everything I know about composing I taught myself through doing, reading, and — most importantly — listening. Actually listening is second most important...really, the most important thing is to just keep practising and writing and writing more and more. Feedback from people was also helpful. My degree is (will be in 2 years) in Film and New Media, and just this year I decided that one school wasn't enough so I'm also pursuing some formal musical education to toss onto my resumé in the form of an online Specialist Certification from Berklee College of Music in Boston. Great program, and by the end of the year I will be a "Specialist in Orchestrating and Producing Music for Film and Games". Bit of a lengthy title, but it'll help pad my resumé. To be perfectly frank with you though, I have never had a client in my entire history of doing this who has ever given a shit about my education. They care about the music: if it's good, you're in. If you have a fancy degree from the best school but the music's not what they're after? Too bad.
Ultimately I think it depends how you learn. Some people just need a formal education to be able to properly absorb and integrate the knowledge. I find that kind of path unnecessary and restrictive, so I teach myself as I go. It's not as solid or predictable a process, but I find it far more intrinsically satisfying and it seems as though it's bearing fruit in terms of work and networking opportunities, so I figure I can't be too far wrong.
I guess that's not as simple an answer as "I go to Julliard and that's awesome", but it's probably more helpful since the path to success in the composing world — as with anything else to a certain extent — is really a personal process. Unless you're aiming for a really straight-forward and predictable career path, everyone's journey will be different. Many will be discouraged, many will do everything right and still fail, and some people who really suck will get your dream job instead of you. That's life, and it's tough, but if you can live with that, continue learning every day, and still find that composing brings you joy, then keep at it and hope for the best. There's a lot of luck involved here, and to be at all competitive (there are a LOT of composers who want the same things) you have to start early. Really early. You're already too late. I'm already too late. It's impossible to start too early.
My point being: never think that you can put off learning something relevant until later — you can, but by then you should already know it and have moved on to the next thing. Speaking of which...Next Steps
The session starts in two hours or so, which means I have to head out to the studio soon (I actually have to pick up my payment from another project that was going on simultaneously on my way there...) After tonight though, there's a bit of a break until the 10th of February, at which point I'm back in the studio with the director and a mixing engineer to put the various takes together, mix all the levels properly, and lay it in with the film for the final product, which will then be screened to an audience of industry folks the evening after, on the 11th.
That being said, I'm off for now, and I will check in again at some point later this week with a quick post-recording session report — hopefully including a bunch of dorky photos! Thanks for the feedback, folks, feel free to chime in some more and I'll address all your thoughts at the end of the next post, as with this one.
Quick Links:
PART 1
PART 2
Marius Masalar
Composer | Writer
www.mariusmasalar.me
Composer | Writer
www.mariusmasalar.me
#17
Posted 02 February 2010 - 06:32 PM
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Starving Musician
Pretty interesting read! I have yet to go through it all, but I'm reading. I'm doing a similar thing right now
btw: Ouch... the Todd-AO is only for Altiverb. How did you get that for SpaceDesigner?
btw: Ouch... the Todd-AO is only for Altiverb. How did you get that for SpaceDesigner?
on Itunes: http://itunes.apple....one/id318578401
#18
Posted 04 February 2010 - 10:05 AM
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Starving Student Musician
A response to the second part of your journal, .
Very cool work, Marius. I thought your track was extremely edgy and tense. I also really appreciated seeing the shots of your logical environment. Especially the shots of Kontakt; it's a lot pretter than imagined. I thought it was gonna be something like NotePad or TextEdit where it's just long strings of code. I was thinking too much of the scripting part of it.
That's all for now. Hopefully for the 3rd part I'll read later, the director will have liked your cues, given you a pat on the back and said, "Mathazzar, you've done it again!"
Until then,
-John
Very cool work, Marius. I thought your track was extremely edgy and tense. I also really appreciated seeing the shots of your logical environment. Especially the shots of Kontakt; it's a lot pretter than imagined. I thought it was gonna be something like NotePad or TextEdit where it's just long strings of code. I was thinking too much of the scripting part of it.
That's all for now. Hopefully for the 3rd part I'll read later, the director will have liked your cues, given you a pat on the back and said, "Mathazzar, you've done it again!"
Until then,
-John
#19
Posted 04 February 2010 - 10:26 AM
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Thanks for this 3rd part - a fascinating journey indeed! I'm probably showing my age, but the last time I seriously worked with timecodes was in the days of having to stripe a track on the reel to reel with the SMPTE code. Those were the days.
Seriously though, they can be a pain in the whatsit to setup - you have my sympathies! Thanks for answering my question - I can see fully the rationale behind it. Another tip to store away in my old brain. Good luck with the session!
Seriously though, they can be a pain in the whatsit to setup - you have my sympathies! Thanks for answering my question - I can see fully the rationale behind it. Another tip to store away in my old brain. Good luck with the session!
#20
Posted 04 February 2010 - 07:35 PM
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Learning composer
Marius, on 02 February 2010 - 04:26 PM, said:
Yes, Logic is what I compose in. I basically do everything except notation in Logic, including writing, sequencing, and mixing/mastering. It's my one-stop shop. You can tell your mother that I have absolutely no formal training in film scoring whatsoever. In fact, the extent of my formal musical education is piano lessons since I was younger. Everything I know about composing I taught myself through doing, reading, and — most importantly — listening. Actually listening is second most important...really, the most important thing is to just keep practising and writing and writing more and more. Feedback from people was also helpful. My degree is (will be in 2 years) in Film and New Media, and just this year I decided that one school wasn't enough so I'm also pursuing some formal musical education to toss onto my resumé in the form of an online Specialist Certification from Berklee College of Music in Boston. Great program, and by the end of the year I will be a "Specialist in Orchestrating and Producing Music for Film and Games". Bit of a lengthy title, but it'll help pad my resumé. To be perfectly frank with you though, I have never had a client in my entire history of doing this who has ever given a shit about my education. They care about the music: if it's good, you're in. If you have a fancy degree from the best school but the music's not what they're after? Too bad.
Thanks for your response, it was extremely helpful and inspiring - especially the quoted paragraph. I'm deciding how to go further (or if I should) with my music and this helps me a lot in the fact that I don't need to switch to a great school or anything, and the listening part as well inspired me, because that's what I'm good at - the 'does it sound good' as oppose to the 'does the major fifth clash with the augmented second in the dissonant chord' part.
- Impresario
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