Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1434375
70 W I N T E R 2 0 2 2 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y difficult, but it's a beautiful thing because you are creating something, and you are gathering all these amazing components with the story and the scripts and what the filmmakers are seeing. So, you do that! Ha! And then [the score] goes through a lot of notes rounds, and there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, in good and challenging ways. Sometimes when you get a lot of different opinions, you have to make sense of them. Yeah, it's kind of muddled when it's coming from 25 different people. Yeah, and as we know, it's really hard to talk about music. Oftentimes you have to interpret what you think someone is trying to articulate. You're thinking to yourself, "I think they mean this." And, unlike the show, music is not crafted frame by frame; it's crafted in words, in beats, and bars. So, if you take out five seconds here and a few frames there, it's like taking a word out of a sentence. Right! And now your sentence doesn't make sense anymore; it's just part of the job. Anyway, you get the pilot and another episode and another and you start developing musically from there and, again, you're still getting notes. My experience has been the further you get into the series, people start to breath a little bit more at all levels, and the music starts to take more of its own shape. Though, I wouldn't say you start to relax. But, you get more confident because you know it's working! Yes, and as things get more confident, the filmmakers sort of say, "I'm going to trust you on this, go off and do your thing." And, hopefully by the end of the season—I wouldn't say it gets easier, but it gets more fun. In terms of the nuts and bolts of that process after you've got the pilot, when does the writing begin for the first time? A lot of times, I will write away from picture first. However, with a pilot you are often given just a few scene assemblies [not the whole show]. Usually it is sent to me because the filmmakers don't know what to do with it temp music-wise. Or, they will say, "These five sections really need an original score now" because they are defining moments of the piece, or they're really where we start to feel the tone of the show. So oftentimes, I'm not doing the entire pilot so much as I'm doing chunks of it. And then it will go to the studio and the network with the show partly scored and partly temp. My assumption is that workflow wise, you are doing a large mock-up in your sequencer, then you are adding whatever live soloist you can, and then maybe there is budget for a small orchestra to blend in to give it that live feel. Is that right? Well, during that approval process [I'll be asking the filmmakers], "Did you like what you heard? Does that work for you?" And if they say "Yes, we are loving that," I'm thinking that's great! But, then you need to have that conversation saying that this does have a dollar sign on it. [This sound] doesn't come for free, it's not coming out of my computer [like this; those are live players]. And, a lot of filmmakers don't know that, and that's fine. It's not their job to know that, and it's our job to let them know that it's not a sample, that it's an actual live person [who I hired on my own dime]. If they do green light it, what's the next step? Logistically, you need to find out if it is being done union or can't be done as that. Those logistical conversations about where to record it need to happen. And often that determination is made by the parameters of the production, as well as by how much money they can provide. So, in an orchestral sense, you are basically describing whether you are going to record it in town (in L.A.) or not. Many of the shows I have worked on have had the option to do either. They can record it in town if they can, and some shows are contractually required to work in town. Say you are going to do orchestral mock- ups, but you're also being afforded the kind of budget that will support orchestral recordings, when do you go and do that? Meaning, you've written your mock-ups, they are approved, and then you schedule it? Yeah! So, that's a good question because that has to be worked into [the production's scheduling]. And I have to ask them when their immovable dub is. Then I know that the dub is this day, and the scoring engineer will need two days to mix this particular project because