Rescore a scene YOUR way - for all those composers out there

I thought this would be a fun thing and is in no way a serious discussion. In another thread people are discussing writing new music for the Thrawn trilogy. Okay, that'd be fun and fine (I'm doing just that). I have another idea that I think will be lots of fun.

To get experience in scoring films, lots of composers suggest taking a movie and cutting out the music/sound to a scene and rescore it yourself. The bad part is that no one ever gets to see these re-scored scenes with fan music. I for one WANT to hear what other composers have done.

While I'm not going to make a site for it, I would really love to hear what movies and scenes you've rescored.

Here are just a few things I've done:

The parade attack scene from Spiderman
Magneto's Theme from X-Men
The clone battle near the end of AOTC (when Mace Windu shows up and saves everyone)

You can email me (JVandergriff@kc.rr.com) or post here. Links to music files would be great.

 

Hi!

Damn, you stole my idea!!!! I thought of that before and acutally I AM thinking of doing a website for this kind of stuff. Where people can exchange their compositions, rescore scenes, participate in competitions... You get the picture. Funny, how 2 people from across the globe may have the same idea.

musicpete

 

I'n not sure how to rescore a scene. Don't you...um...need an orchestra? Or at least a fairly large group of friends that are talented?

 

That, or a lot of money.


Seriously though, I don't get it. How can you rescore it if you don't have a full orchestra/ect?

 

Samples, sound fonts, MIDI, pianos, friends who are musicians...it really doesn't take all that much.

Okay, to the vast majority of people, it's an incredible amount of work, but to me it's relatively easy. First you spot the scene and get a rough idea of what music to put in there at different shots. Then, you lay down your tempos. The tempos match the action or dialog, allowing you to synchronize music with film. Once you've got your tempos down, you start writing. Finished with writing, you control the volume, music edits, etc. and record it with the movie.

If you have a soundblaster Live! soundcard, the "soundfonts" are technically samples. Professional samples sound much better though.

If you're just starting to write film music, don't jump right into something like Star Wars, 'cause it's easy to write something that doesn't sound appropriate, or worse...make it sound way overblown and it seems goofy.

By far the hardest scene I've re-scored so far is the Parade Attack scene from Spiderman.

I can email people if they want to know more. Just send me a private message and I can give you more info.

 

I've always found this to be an interesting idea. The problem for someone like me, aka average no-music expertise Joe, is that it's hard to really do it. One of the interesting features that has come along with several DVDs is to do our own editing. I believe the Men In Black DVD has such a feature. Now, if a DVD producer can do something similar with music, then it would fully utilize the interaction aspects of the DVD format, which is in itself one of the great qualities of such a medium.