Music Composition DUMmIES

Knowing this, you would have a couple of choices in deciding what to do with

the music for that cut. You could

Cut the music from the love scene and jump in with chase music.

Use the same music for both scenes.

Fade the love scene music out while fading the chase scene music in

(crossfade).

Decide not to use music at all for one of the scenes.

Compose a piece of music that makes a musical transition from one

mood to another at exactly 1:04:28.13.

There are probably other choices, but these are the most obvious ones to us.

If you switch music at the scene change, you will have to be careful in order

for the transition to sound natural and musical. This means that you will have

to choose a tempo and a starting time code addressfor the first piece that will

land you on the scene change at a musical point — like the first beat of the

17th measure, or some other musical accent point. This is where computers

come in mighty handy. If you know the exact length in hours, minutes, sec-

onds, and frames of each scene to be scored, and you have a general idea of

your tempo, you can slightly alter the tempo so that you come out at a good

musical transition point at the exact frame you want.

Working with proxy movies ..............................................................

You will be watching the movie and “shuttling” it back and forth —

continuously stopping and rewinding the film, or fast-forwarding it in order

to get a feel for the overall film or just a single section you want to score —

as you come up with your musical ideas. The movie is loaded into your com-

puter software along with your music. You don’t really need to work with a

high-resolution copy of the film, so it is a good idea to request a proxy movie.

A proxy movie is a copy of the movie made at lower resolution. Lower resolu-

tion means lower quality, but high-resolution movies require a lot of process-

ing power from your computer, and you want to save the processing power

for your musical compositions. Later, after you export your work onto the

proxy movie, your music can be transferred over to the high-res version of

the movie. Proxy movies have all the same content as the high-res version as

far as scenes and SMPTE addresses are concerned, they just have smaller file

sizes so you can work faster.

212 Part IV: Orchestration and Arrangement