Outlining structure and timings
Film composers score countless projects during their career journeys, including short films, documentaries, infomercials, commercials, feature films, et cetera. Often, they will first sit at the piano with a blank sheet of music and a pencil, trying to figure out timings, meter, tempo, bars, melodies, and harmonies. Others may go straight to Logic Pro and use the software to do this. The main objective in film music is to figure out the appropriate tempo so that the specific events (hit points) fall on the downbeat of a bar and complement the scene.
If a film composer has to write a short piece of music, let’s say, if a film director requests 30 seconds of music for a commercial, the question now becomes: how can I fit and format music in those 30 seconds? Calculating the music timing can be challenging because most want to get straight to writing the music. But to know what to write, and in what format to write it, you have to go through some...