film scoring 101: My Westworld experience

I recently entered the Spitfire Audio Westworld Scoring Competition and composed my submission live in 3 parts. Across this 4-hour experience, I scored the competition scene and taught my film scoring process to thousands of composers. One viewer in particular RCTO shared the following comment that distills my entire approach to scoring film into a series of beautiful, concise bullet points:

from RCTO:

Thanks a ton for this series, I made some notes while watching throughout; which then ended up being so invaluable for my own submission, and accordingly my first ever composition, which I'm really happy with:

  • Make use of tempo changes!

  • Avoid over-resolved major / minors (prefer two / seven / nine)

  • Score a perspective change (from person to person or thing to thing)

  • Score one of:

    • Protagonist

    • Environment

    • Theme

  • Every single thing and change should correspond to something on the picture.

  • Think about the producers and the intention they had.

  • Think of the music as a second narrator.

  • Don’t worry about literally trying to sync perfectly; you’ll screw up your music trying to fudge it.

  • Pauses are an instrument.

  • React to what you see on screen, but don’t give away what’s going to happen in advance.

  • Music -6dB from events on screen.

  • Lower the frequencies around where speech normally sits.

  • -14LUFS is the industry standard for music volume

You can watch my final submission above. I wish the best for all of you who submitted!