MY FIRST MOVIE SCORE / understanding music in movies

A few months ago a friend rang me up and asked me if I would try and make film music. I never tried movie scoring and it seemed very exciting so I said YES and here it is!!

The film is about a girl who is a bit lost in life, she is trying to be an artist but cannot decide what kind so she writes poetry, paints and makes jewelry but ends up abandoning every project because she feels it's all too amateur and not good enough. Her boyfriend leaves her, she gets fired from her job and ends up alone and with not much to do. After a while she begins to talk to a famous poet Paul Valery, asking him for advice and not realizing he does not exist. In the meantime she picks up anther project - she sculpts the hands of her ex boyfriend and starts wearing them like a suit...

I found movie scoring to be a very exciting and new but challenging experience. Usually, we watch movies with music already being in them and our brains don't tend to separate one from the other. We are not aware that the music is there. It's part of what we see, it's part of what we feel, it's a part of the whole experience. We may listen to the soundtrack later but we never see a movie without the sound on. And that's what was interesting for me. When she sent me the movie, there were scenes with absolutely no sound in them. Nothing. Not even ambient noise. Complete silence. I realized then that this time I was the one who is supposed to decide what kind of music fits the scene best. I was the one who had the power to change the atmosphere and the feeling of the scene in whatever way I saw fit. In other words, I was in complete control of what music will do to the scene and to the viewer. And there were other challenges.

I had to work with multiple monitors. One was for watching the movie back and forth and the other was for monitoring the recording. I had to make sure that the duration of the track fits the duration of the scene perfectly. Otherwise, the music doesn't work and since I was not a part of the post-production or montage, it had to be spot on! The other major thing was to decide on the overall sound of the music in the film. I wanted it to be consistent throughout, to have the same kind of sound from the beginning and to be played on the same few instruments. If you put in an electric guitar and then an acoustic and then somewhere maybe a piano and some vocals and then you use only percussions in one scene etc. you get a weird mix of everything that ends up being nothing. So I opted for my recently re-discovered guitar (https://steemit.com/life/@grobens/my-world-war-ii-guitar-and-how-it-came-to-life-again), an accordion and some hand claps. The other problem I came across was having to play and watch the scene at the same time. That meant I had to practice all my ideas before the actual recording so I didn't have to look at the guitar or the accordion to know what I'm doing. Other than that, I got the hang of it fairly quickly and I was enjoying myself more than ever!

I'm not allwed to show you scenes from the movie because it's not out yet but I can leave a link to what become my first ever MOVIE THEME. I hope you will enjoy this as much as I did!