Film Scoring Bundle: Writing Music For Films: Parts 1 and 2

Explore how to match a film scene's emotion to its cue by watching and feeling the moment, then applying music theory and chord progressions to convey sadness or happiness.

Learn to score quickly by applying genre-specific music theory, choosing era-appropriate instruments and diatonic progressions, and using modes to convey emotion across jazz, reggae, rock, and more.

Explore how motives and leitmotifs evolve with a character, and how modes like Phrygian for klezmer can carry through a film to glue the score.

Reinforce the film's message by punctuating key moments with music, without altering the director's intent, to amplify scenes.

The video overlays the dissonant threnody on a children's cartoon to illustrate how powerful music can be in film scoring, creating a dark, inappropriate mood.

Learn to work with temp cues, their benefits and pitfalls, and how to replace them while respecting rights, mood, rhythm, and instrument ideas like steel drums or vibes.

Participate in a spotting session with the director to review the film edit, note cues and timings, and establish the music's emotional flow and trust essential for final approval.

Navigate film music budgets, from composer pay to studio time, musician fees, and licensing popular tracks. Decide between electronic or live musicians, and plan sheet music and recording costs.

Explore diegetic (source) and non-diegetic (score) music, learn how source cues integrate with a film’s score, and see how bar bands or radios shape scenes.

Explore how source and score music create perspective shifts in a Jaws clip, moving from character hearing to audience-only shark music.

Explore source music elements in a High Fidelity scene where a character turns up the volume, showing how source music is heard in scene and differs from the score.

Explore schaus, the blend of score and source, as music crosses cuts and dovetails scenes, with the director deciding whether it continues as background.

Analyze a Battlestar Galactica scene where two pilots return home as the radio plays metamorphosis one by Philip Glass, illustrating the shift from source to score.

Discover how ostinato drives film music, illustrated by Captain America Civil War's opening titles and sequence, showing two riffs with static harmony and an overture-like introduction.

Analyze how the Requiem for a Dream score uses a string quartet with a persistent ostinato and selective electronic textures to create a creeping, memorable soundtrack.

Discover the ostinato, a short repeating melody or pattern that forms the canvas of a film score, often instrumental and adaptable for harmony, melody, and percussion.

Learn to score a silent film by selecting a public domain movie, downloading it from archive.org, and creating a score in a sequencer or notation software.

Set up a fresh sequencer session for film scoring, selecting piano and orchestra tracks, adding mallets and ostinato ideas, importing the film and muting music during dialogue.

Create a creepy ostinato inspired by Requiem for a Dream, looping a timed sequence, adjusting tempo, octave shifts, and tremolo strings to build tension.

Add more elements to your ostinato by layering piano and legato strings, shifting octaves, and incorporating a sustained low C for drama, while adjusting tempo to hit on beats.

Marking hits demonstrates using markers to label events like enter, cop, and transition, align hits to beats and quarter notes, and consider tempo or meter changes to create musical significance.

In this intro finishing session, the composer layers strings and winds, uses ostinatos and dissonant C minor chords, and refines tempo and fades to cue the scene.

Discover how a c minor ostinato drives a four-chord cycle—c minor, d minor, g minor, and f—while the second line adds energy with octave jumps and f sharp dissonance.

Learn to work with notation editors by exporting and analyzing a two-bar ostinato riff, manage cross-program export issues, and explore a free music score file.

Explore motive and leitmotif, recurring melodies and ostinatos that glue film scenes and assign character themes to convey subtext and memory.

Explore how John Williams crafts Star Wars through leitmotifs for characters and concepts like the force, Vader, and the rebels, using partial motifs and the thematic weaving that echoes opera.

Explore how Wagner's ring cycle uses leitmotifs to reveal characters and emotions, and how the brass section, including the Wagner Tubin, expanded with new instruments to shape orchestration.

Explore locating leitmotifs by identifying recurring cues for the judge character, marking scenes, and testing an ostinato as the judge's theme.

Craft a judge leitmotif to underscore a crime-scene sequence, building it from a recurring chord progression, expanding with woodwinds, legato strings, and rhythmic ostinatos for dynamic pacing.

Explore how to create tension in film scoring by adding rhythm to a piano riff, building an ostinato over a chord progression, and evolving leitmotifs to drive scenes.

Listen to the cue in context and compare its repetition with the judge’s theme. The instructor evaluates scoring options and whether a shorter cue could work, highlighting leitmotif and ostinato.

Explore how point of view shapes film scoring by aligning music to the camera's eye and a character's perspective, using script cues and scene analysis.

Discover how to find and analyze point-of-view scenes in film scoring, using a scene that shifts between an unseen observer and the head detective to shape mood and rhythm.

Experiment with string textures, from tremolo and lagarto to staccato ensembles. Build a pov scene score around c minor and g minor, using ostinato, arpeggiated chords, and rhythmic piano.

Balance the mix to keep dialogue clear while analyzing a pov scene, then demonstrate a two-chord C minor to E-flat major progression with arpeggiation and selective non-chord tones.

The instructor splits the film scoring course into two parts to thoroughly cover all topics, promising wrap-up videos and affordable access to part two.

Learn atmospheric scoring for scenes with minimal action, using music as sound effects, and see how to build a portfolio and connect with directors to land first gigs.

Explore composition techniques for film scoring, focusing on writing music to accompany film and developing a film composer career, with practical projects and portfolio-building opportunities.

Explore film scoring tools with Ableton Live as primary audio and MIDI sequencer, plus notation options like Finale, Sibelius, and D'Errico, and orchestral libraries such as Ableton Orchestre and EastWest.

Compose two hours of wordless choir music for a film under a director's directive, using a male octet to create a slow, somber opening that ends abruptly.

Follow the instructor as he continues the devil sleep movie project, demonstrating a single technique per cue and thinking aloud rather than perfecting every detail.

Explore atmosphere as a subdued, spacious film cue that stays out of the way. Learn how orchestral textures or electronic pads create vast, slow, and emotionally open scenes with examples.

District Nine's main title blends slow moving orchestra with pad textures and a multilingual singer to create atmosphere; it shifts from a solitary melody to rhythmic ostinato.

Explore how Thomas Newman's Finding Nemo cue uses a slow string pad and a wandering piano to create an atmospheric, non-melodic texture, illustrating fleeting melodies and mood over memorability.

Explore pad sounds from analog synths and their blend with orchestra, focusing on envelope shaping, layering, and fade transitions to craft dramatic film scores.

Explore using modes to shape atmosphere in film scoring, especially the Dorian mode as a nuanced minor sound between happy and sad, with piano harmonies.

Identify and implement an atmospheric cue for a film scene by adopting the kid's point of view during a tense police interrogation, conveying nervousness and agitation.

Offset the piano and chords by two beats to create atmosphere, then layer reverb, pads, and strings to heighten tension and prepare orchestration.

Analyze a cue in C Dorian, a minor scale with raised sixth, and explore modal vamp and modal meandering for atmosphere, noting how bass notes reveal chords.