Creative Strategies in Film Scoring: Audio and Video Access Included

Amazing book and great teacher

There are some basic concepts and contextualized examples, it's not about arranging and orchestrating

This as a "big picture" set of real life/real world strategies for how to approach composing music for particular emotional circumstances. A heavy emphasis is placed on analyzing what has been done well in popular movie scores, and working within a creative team. To get the most from this book the reader needs a firm understanding of music harmony and orchestration and has some experience with scoring to picture. This is not a "how to" score a film from the bottom up. Thankfully this doesn't have an overly simplistic beginning describing what a melody is, what basic chords are, and how to read musical notation. Instead, this book assumes that the reader is a serious and dedicated, somewhat established, composer.I think it is great for composers looking to expand their work with film and advertising and would be a godsend for a composer who just landed their first full-length film scoring job and is overwhelmed by the scope of the project and asking "what now? There is so much to do and so many questions to answer!" The book provides a method for approaching any film/music circumstance and ways to answer the most common musical/artistic situations found when composing a film score.Personally, I have struggled with how often my music should respond to edits in a film and the book provided a process for deciding if my music should change when the edits happen, and which types of edits are most important to respond to. That word "method" or "process" is key here. The book doesn't provide answers for all people at all times, but instead it provides a way to get to the answer.I found myself watching movies and analyzing scores differently after reading the book. While I was always amazed by the melodic and harmonic choices, now I notice many other aspects, like how the music reinforces the location and time period of the scene, and how the entire creative team must have worked together to make sure the music works with dialogue and sound FX throughout the movie.As a composer and producer with some short film credits to my name, I really enjoyed the book. Though it is short(under 200 pages), it is not a quick read. It is information-packed and requires a large amount of musical and technical knowledge before it can be really useful. For novice composers just starting to learn music theory, orchestration, and melodic construction I think there are some other resources to get going with the basics, but for somewhat established composer/producers, this book provides a great resource to answer the question "How do I approach this scene?".

A really great book, well written, that gives you a very in detail tips on how to write music to picture.

Everything is in detail