Does anyone have tips for film scoring for a newbie

I have done 3 short film scores in the past year a half which have all competed in the 48 Film Project - the largest independent film fest in America.

48 Hour Film Project

1) There are scenes you can download from YouTube that have the scores removed. Use these as practice just so you get a feel of you will eventually be doing.
2) Go to your local university or find local film makers to work with on a project. It is a completely different beast than doing music for a rapper/singer who will pretty much accept anything you give them
3) Hopefully, you're already doing this, but learn how to create emotion with your music. Chord progressions, melodies (no 5 note trap melodies), changes in energy and volume, etc.
4) Expect to create some very beautiful music that the director will reject. As a matter of fact, expect a lot of rejected ideas
5) Give the director TONS of different versions of the same song (theme) so that the director can choose what he's really looking for
6) Directors usually tend to not speak the same language as musicians, so find ways to communicate emotion and instruments and tone to them
7) Expect that for every 30 minutes of music you create the director will only use about 2 minutes of it LOL
8) Enroll in the Hans Zimmer Masterclass that will be releasing soon. It costs around $99
 
Olie said:
Interesting info, you didn't clear up what a film score is though and the differences between it and a soundtrack. I always assumed film scores also followed the scenes too.
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The score is the music written for the movie. Really it refers to the actual written score put in front of the players. But I guess now it has a wider meaning. The soundtrack is probably more of a technical term for the actual, like, channel(s) on the final dub that contains all the music.

But that's not what I said. What I said was that there is a difference between making a soundtrack (or scoring) and making a piece of music in the style of a soundtrack.
 
This thread just made me log in after quite a while away.

You're asking the right questions, but you're missing something very important here: You want to compose a soundtrack, but you don't have anything to compose for.

A thing that helps me a lot is pick up some scenes from certain movies and replace the original soundtrack with one I made specifically for that scene.

Pay attention to the feelings evoked in the scene, or what the director/sound super wants to evoke in said scene.

Try to match the tempo of the song with the duration of the scene (it helps a lot for synchronizing elements in the song with what's been shown).

Try to capture the essence of the film, and use it as an inspiration for your work. A jazz piece wouldn't normally fit a thriller/horror movie. But what if you lay some deep drone underneath a jazz piece?

Here's the link for a a short movie (thriller) I composed the music for called "Jerry", which was awarded the best Music/Sound of the 1st International Short Film Contest of Shanghai:

vimeo.com/193442396
 
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