Thread: Film scoring practice. Need feedback!

I'm not sure if many of you here are experienced in film scoring, but I really need as much feedback as possible on my dramatic scoring, so I figured I'd take my chances and post here anyway.



I took a scene from a 1975 bank robbery thriller called "Dog Day Afternoon" and wrote music to it, in order to practice scoring to picture. I have virtually no experience doing this (the only film I scored previously was a 4 minute student film in 2010), so I'm a little rusty on the process. Feedback and suggestions would be very much appreciated!

Clean track here: http://soundcloud.com/stevenobrien/t...cue-rescore-of

And if anyone's interested, here are some more compositions I've made since my last post here:
Adventurous Orchestral Piece
Waltz for Accordion
Two Romances for Piano (Set unfinished)
Piece for Harp and Flute

Thanks for listening,
-Steven

I would like to start by saying that I think this is very good - I have never tried this and that I think this is much better than what I could do. Thus my feedback should be taken in the loosest terms.

My overall impression is that the music is perhaps a little too much - as in it attracts a too much notice. I think this is particularly the case between 1:10 and 1:23 where perhaps the music could be very faint; we want to be looking at the guy rather than the music and it would be quite nice if the music came back in at 1:23 when the scene changes again - which you do do. I just think more would have been nice.

But overall good job - and I think the orchestration is pretty good too.

I thought it worked really well. Do you mind if I ask what you used to make it?

Originally Posted by Ramako

I would like to start by saying that I think this is very good - I have never tried this and that I think this is much better than what I could do. Thus my feedback should be taken in the loosest terms.

My overall impression is that the music is perhaps a little too much - as in it attracts a too much notice. I think this is particularly the case between 1:10 and 1:23 where perhaps the music could be very faint; we want to be looking at the guy rather than the music and it would be quite nice if the music came back in at 1:23 when the scene changes again - which you do do. I just think more would have been nice.

But overall good job - and I think the orchestration is pretty good too.

I appreciate all opinions! In my experience, sometimes the opinions of even those who know absolutely nothing about the subject are the most helpful.

I think I'd agree with you that the music is a little overbearing for what it's accompanying, hopefully I can improve and exercise more restraint in the future.

I'm glad you found my orchestration satisfactory too!

Originally Posted by nicecomposer

I thought it worked really well. Do you mind if I ask what you used to make it?

Thanks . I wrote the score in Sibelius and used virtual MIDI cables to send the MIDI data to my DAW. I wrote up a long blog about my samples/mixing here: http://www.64digits.com/users/index....ents&id=501029

very nice. I've got to order those sample modeling products

I agree with Ramako that at times it feels a bit too much, and that the music is dominating the actual movie

but other than that i thought it was awesome and when i first started watching i actually thought it was part of the movie, great job!

Great job with changing the music every time the scene changed. I thought your score enhanced the screen action.