# Composer-Director-Producer relationships



## EvanArnett (Feb 8, 2021)

I have worked as composer on a bunch of media projects over the years, but I've now find myself doing more post engineering and working closely with media producers who don't have a lot of experience working with and giving direction to composers. I want to help them (my producer colleagues) to have an understanding of the other side of that working relationship and help set them up for success. But I thought it might be a good idea to reach out beyond my own experiences to give the best possible advice. 

I was hoping some of the working composers here might be willing to share tips or stories of things that went well, or else terribly wrong, with directors and producers when working on various projects. No names needed! What do you wish they understood better beforehand or wish they did differently? I've got a whole speech about temp-itis, but other than that, budgeting, scheduling, revisions, clarity of language, expectations.

Would also love to hear about any articles or books that I can reference.


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## dgburns (Feb 8, 2021)

Producer to you:

Dear Mr Composer, I’ve got a gig. It’s really EASY, should take no time at all. I don’t have alot of budget. I’ll put you in touch with director boy.

Director to you:

Hey bud, long time no see, hey I’ve got a gig for ya. We are going to make the BEST thing ever to have graced the silver screen. It will be epic, we will spare no expense and effort. We are gonna go nuts and take over the world. And we are gonna make tons of money ( read, he got his fee )

You:

Oh, I got a gig, Producer won’t tell me their budget. I’ll try and write something director boy wants. 

The Game is afoot:

You write Ben Hur. Then director boy will pass it by Producer. Producer makes changes. Director boy and Producer agree on changes. Producer pitches to Network. Network requests changes. Director boy is not happy. Eventually agrees to some of the changes after temper tantrum. 

2nd round:

Director boy plays new changes to Producer. Producer not happy with the changes. Requests more changes. Eventually Producer approves changes, and re-pitches to Network. 

Endgame:

Network still not happy, expresses concern that project is not hitting the demographic. Time has run out. All is lost !!! Producer suggests a new direction, pitches the original idea. Network loves it !! Wonders why this was not presented in first place...

Producer requests your original version to be delivered to video editor, and sends request for your invoice, to a numbered company.

You get paid. Wine is good. If not wine, then beer will do.


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## charlieclouser (Feb 8, 2021)

I have tons of stories of when things went well - from "Just do what you do, man." (SAW franchise) to the show runner who liked to limit his instructions to me to four syllables or less: "Big big fun fun" (slo-mo low-angle casino walk-through) or "Make us all cry" (she's telling him she had a miscarriage) or "Dead serious" (there's a bomb in the casino). 

I have fewer stories (well, one) of when things didn't go so well, and I might have told it on here already. It's an example of what can happen when poor communication with the composer goes wrong and costs everyone time and energy. 

I just got done typing it up for a thread on Gearslutz so I'll save some time and copy+paste it here:

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I had one network series gig where, on the first episode I struggled and did four revisions of a cue and it still wasn't working for the team. The temp I had heard, which nobody liked, was done by a composer that the pilot's director liked and had worked with before, but he took the direction "sort of a modern noir feel" a little too literally and actually had mournful trumpet on there. Like, actual noir, LA Confidential style trumpet! So wrong for the show, and it provided basically zero guidance for me because it wasn't even in the right century / millennium. So I bonked back and forth and by the time revision four got the "I dunno, still not working for me" answer, in desperation I said, "Maybe it needs a Michael Clayton type thing, simple, dark, but moving forward, like this:" and I started human-beatboxing the drums from Michael Clayton and singing a simple two-note melody. All eyes in the room lit up and they said, "EXACTLY! That's what we had in the original temp, and everyone loved it!"

But... I HAD NEVER HEARD THAT TEMP. That was the temp that went to the other composer who came back with noir trumpet riffs! And nobody had ever mentioned Michael Clayton to me up to that point - all I had heard was the other composer's music that WASN'T working for them. Now, I know the Michael Clayton score really well, it's one of my favorites. Not that I could actually DO a reasonable facsimile or anything, but I definitely know what it sounds like and why it works so well. Sophisticated, sleek, minimal, modern, tasteful, tasty - it's perfect. If they'd played me that version of the temp, or even just said "a Michael Clayton vibe" to me I'd have known exactly what to strive for.

When I came out of that meeting and went into the office of the post supervisor to say hello (who, coincidentally I'd worked with on another series for years with much success and almost no revisions) and she asked, "Did you guys ever find a solution for that cue?" and I told her that the solution was Michael Clayton but that I had never heard those words mentioned until I said them myself, she was aghast - "Wait... you mean they never played you the original temp that got the series picked up in the first place? They only played you that awful trumpet stuff?!?!" and I was like, "Yup. I pulled the Michael Clayton reference out of my ass." She viewed that whole sequence of events as a monumental breakdown in communication between the show runner and myself and started searching for who had neglected to give me a version with the original Michael Clayton temp in place. 

But by then it was too late. I wound up quitting the show anyway, since I'm accustomed to pitching no-hitters, and I although they resisted my leaving, I framed it as, "You guys deserve to get the music you like without going around the block four times, and I guess I'm not reading the vibe correctly." So they hired the guy who did the noir trumpet! Of course, once he was getting more accurate instructions he did much better, but it was definitely a case where if I'd heard their original temp, with big-dollar score drops all over the place, I wouldn't have been fishing in the dark with no bait.

Moral of that story = make sure to wring out of them every molecule of information about what music they might have tried already, and what they did and didn't like about it.


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## ReDiRoma (Feb 9, 2021)

charlieclouser said:


> I have tons of stories of when things went well - from "Just do what you do, man." (SAW franchise) to the show runner who liked to limit his instructions to me to four syllables or less: "Big big fun fun" (slo-mo low-angle casino walk-through) or "Make us all cry" (she's telling him she had a miscarriage) or "Dead serious" (there's a bomb in the casino).
> 
> I have fewer stories (well, one) of when things didn't go so well, and I might have told it on here already. It's an example of what can happen when poor communication with the composer goes wrong and costs everyone time and energy.
> 
> ...


Thank you. 
How often is it, that you come up with an idea that might seem totally out-there , but it ends up being great for the scene / movie / episode ? 
Or is it individual for the medium ? I guess there is less time for experimenting when its TV ?


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## charlieclouser (Feb 9, 2021)

Yeah there's less time to experiment on tv than on movies, unless you're lucky enough to be on a show that has very little music, which never seems to happen to me. I seem to always get the "wall-to-wall" type gigs....

But even the movies wind up being scary deadlines sometimes - so if tv is sheer panic then movies are only mild panic!

But I still find time to experiment, in fact it's always some kind of experiment to find a solution that can produce the right results in the time available. I don't write orchestral style music, which for me would just take too long, but even the electronic / hybrid style is super time consuming and involves lots of processing and manipulating audio, bouncing elements from Ableton Live, etc. So it's not "hard" per se, but it is usually labor-intensive and time consuming.

But I still wind up with some "get out of jail free" cards here and there - one cue that I remember was a really long tension builder as a crooked cop pulls over the car with the hero's wife who is trying to escape the weird town. I wound up using just four chunks of aleatoric dissonant high woodwinds cluster sustains. I took the audio and stuck it into Ableton Live and time-stretched the hell out of them, manipulating the granular settings and pitches to create a five-minute slab, with peaks and valleys, that gradually built to the climax, and the rhythmic pulse element was created by having a simple whole-note sawtooth LFO controlling Ableton's AutoFilter on one of the time-stretched and down-pitched pieces of audio of a flute cluster sustain. That one saved my butt because it covered a long, quiet, talky scene with only about four tracks of audio but kept changing and building, and only took an hour or two from head-scratching to printing the mix.

Of course any time I gained back from doing that cue so quickly was erased by other cues that needed a big percussion build but only lasted 20 seconds! 

One time-saver I've used on tv series that go for multiple seasons is to create a toolbox of "act end" elements that can be dropped on top of an existing cue to turn it into an "act out" that leads into a commercial break. When I'd built an "act end" cue that everyone liked, I'd bounce all the non-musical elements to audio, and make all the files exactly the same length (like 15 seconds or whatever), and I'd do this whenever I created a new act end cue, always bouncing to exactly the same length. Those elements would be things like backwards drums+cymbals, textural risers+sucks, etc. but would have no key or pitched information that might conflict with other stuff. Then, as I'm working on a new cue that just happens to lead into a commercial break I could just dip into the toolbox and grab a bunch of those audio files, drop them on the timeline so they lined up with the ending, and pick and choose my favorite 4 out of 16 or whatever, building a new combination for each act ending. That way each act end sounded different but still like they were all coming from the same sonic world, and I never had to use stock "risers and sucks" Kontakt libraries or whatever - it was all stuff I'd built from scratch for that show, but would have been far too time consuming to do six times for each episode. So I'd build one or two from scratch for each episode and make sure to bounce their elements to my toolbox folder, and build the rest from toolbox elements from the previous season or whatever. Of course this was for a show where they wanted each act end to have a massive, cliff-hanger, "suck up" sound going into the commercial break, and not every show is like that. But when they always want "more more more" this technique can save you from spending two days just building act endings every week.


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## reborn579 (Feb 9, 2021)

charlieclouser said:


> One time-saver I've used on tv series that go for multiple seasons is to create a toolbox of "act end" elements that can be dropped on top of an existing cue to turn it into an "act out" that leads into a commercial break. When I'd built an "act end" cue that everyone liked, I'd bounce all the non-musical elements to audio, and make all the files exactly the same length (like 15 seconds or whatever), and I'd do this whenever I created a new act end cue, always bouncing to exactly the same length. Those elements would be things like backwards drums+cymbals, textural risers+sucks, etc. but would have no key or pitched information that might conflict with other stuff. Then, as I'm working on a new cue that just happens to lead into a commercial break I could just dip into the toolbox and grab a bunch of those audio files, drop them on the timeline so they lined up with the ending, and pick and choose my favorite 4 out of 16 or whatever, building a new combination for each act ending. That way each act end sounded different but still like they were all coming from the same sonic world, and I never had to use stock "risers and sucks" Kontakt libraries or whatever - it was all stuff I'd built from scratch for that show, but would have been far too time consuming to do six times for each episode. So I'd build one or two from scratch for each episode and make sure to bounce their elements to my toolbox folder, and build the rest from toolbox elements from the previous season or whatever. Of course this was for a show where they wanted each act end to have a massive, cliff-hanger, "suck up" sound going into the commercial break, and not every show is like that. But when they always want "more more more" this technique can save you from spending two days just building act endings every week.


this is a really good idea


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## charlieclouser (Feb 9, 2021)

EvanArnett said:


> What do you wish they understood better beforehand or wish they did differently?


To expand on my story about the poor communication from the show runner to the composer which resulted in four trips around the block, when dealing with translating a temp score into a composed score, it's super-helpful (and very professional and smacks of experience) if the producers / director would say things like:

- The temp on this scene is not right, but it's "the least wrong" of all the approaches we've tried.

- We've tried big epic trialer-style and it sounded forced and corny. We've tried John Williams melodic style and it didn't sound modern or evil enough. But at least we've eliminated two approaches.... we think.

- We wanted the vibe of "Hereditary" and we dropped some of those cues in but they didn't pack enough weight to compete with all the chaos on screen and the sound fx. We all liked the feel that score has, but the diameter and weight of it just isn't enough.

In other words, having the producers try to explain WHAT they've tried and WHY it worked or didn't goes a long way. The worst-case scenario is when they just say, "We hate the temp" and nothing more. Sometimes you just have to accept that and then go to the music editor who built the temp (or sometimes it's just the picture editor) and have a sidebar conversation after the spotting session to interrogate them and get the details. Often the producer has too much other stuff to worry about, and has to rush off to a VFX meeting or whatever, so I would sit in the bay with the picture editor and get them to tell me stuff like, "Man, we tried everything from The Shining to Se7en to classic Goldsmith and Hermann and they hated it all. We need a modern textural feel but not too big and heavy, with an organic, acoustic footprint... and no synthesizers. Good freaking luck dude."

Actually, if I ever had such a detailed version of "we have no idea what might work, but we found four things that DON'T work" then I'd be in heaven.

Some composers hate temp scores, but I love them. At least it means that someone, somewhere, has TRIED to think about what music might work, where it might go, etc. If I get picture with no temp, it might mean that the story / acting / editing is so strong it can work with no music - but it might mean that they are so convinced they've got greatness on their hands that they don't need to "save the scene" with score, or that they're in such a panic trying to salvage something from a disastrous mess the they didn't even have time to think about score. But this is rare for me; if they truly have greatness on their hands, even a bad temp score can only do limited damage, and if they have a disastrous mess then even a great temp score can only help so much. Usually it's somewhere in the middle. The best case scenario is when any scene can work with or without score - but that rarely happens to me!

Of course, if there is no temp then you're standing in the middle of the desert without a compass. So I like hearing a temp.


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## wonshu (Feb 9, 2021)

Hi Charlie,

your openness and insight are very very much appreciated!


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## JohnG (Feb 9, 2021)

great stuff from @charlieclouser as usual.

My own tips:

*1. Try to avoid musical terms*; best to stick to descriptive, dramatic terms like, "floaty, menacing, intimate" or similar. One director with whom I worked can actually play piano sonatas and that kind of thing, so he does know what he's saying. But most who use musical terminology flounder because they are trying to recall details of long-ago, faint memories from beginning piano. "Please don't use a clarinet" could mean, upon further discussion, oboe, saxophone, or even some kind of fretted instrument. "This section should be fortissimo" might mean "intense and scary" or something actually altogether different, utterly unrelated to dynamics.

*2. Hone in on specifics of any musical directions. *When a director or producer says "Jerry Goldsmith," you might think of "Air Force One" and she's thinking, "Rudy."

*3. Don't abandon your instincts.* Write what you think the scene / picture really needs. If the scene includes something already really sad and the acting, writing are doing their thing, you may not want "sad" music at all, even if that's requested. It might be better to write something sweet, or nostalgic; maybe more of a song-like piece instead of "nudge-nudge: this is SAD." Of course we are to some extent servants, so we need to follow instructions in the end, but we are highly trained, knowledgeable servants. The first instinct of some filmmakers can sometimes be an idea that has been over-used, and part of our role is to offer suggestions or alternative musical approaches. Maybe the music ought to play something that's not already on the screen?


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## ReDiRoma (Feb 9, 2021)

charlieclouser said:


> Yeah there's less time to experiment on tv than on movies, unless you're lucky enough to be on a show that has very little music, which never seems to happen to me. I seem to always get the "wall-to-wall" type gigs....
> 
> But even the movies wind up being scary deadlines sometimes - so if tv is sheer panic then movies are only mild panic!
> 
> ...


Great, understood.


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## charlieclouser (Feb 9, 2021)

JohnG said:


> *1. Try to avoid musical terms*; best to stick to descriptive, dramatic terms like, "floaty, menacing, intimate" or similar. One director with whom I worked can actually play piano sonatas and that kind of thing, so he does know what he's saying. But most are trying to recall details of long-ago, faint memories from beginning piano. "Please don't use a clarinet" could mean, upon further discussion, oboe, saxophone, or even some kind of fretted instrument. "This section should be fortissimo" might mean "intense and scary" or something actually altogether different, utterly unrelated to dynamics.


Yes, avoid musical terminology if at all possible. I did remember another horror story of mis-communication:

Thriller feature, final act. One character breaking into a house at night to get the macguffin, bad guy comes home and seven-minute hide-n-seek, cat-n-mouse game ensues. Needs big energy, big tension, big thrills. I built a crazy elaborate tempo and meter map that matched the picture exactly. Plenty of stops, starts, tempo ramps, a few bars of 7/8 or 5/4 here and there, the whole works. It was awesome. So I populated it with small, tense percussion and discordant brass swells, as one does. Played it for the producer, the "head of screen music" at one of the big studios (not an indie film).

He liked the approach, but said it felt too linear, too "loopy". So he said, "Here, I'll show you what I mean. Mute the score and play the scene from the top." Then he proceeded to play drums by slapping his hands on his thighs, doing off-kilter rhythms, odd time signatures, etc. After about 15 seconds I thought I had the gist of what he was trying to communicate, and I said, "Oh, okay, I think I see..." but he just....kept... going. At the one-minute mark I made eye contact with one of the producers from the studio, and she made this expression like, "I don't know what the hell he's doing either, just let him keep going." Dude played thigh-drums all the way through the entire scene - I thought maybe I should have recorded it in case he was actually dictating the precise rhythmic structure for the entire piece.

He plays a big build and flourish at the end of the scene, turns to us and says, "See? Like THAT."

Okay, cool. 

So I go back to the lab and spent a few days making the tempo / meter map more elaborate and asymmetrical, and built out the most insane drum and percussion piece ever. Like, crazy shit - sticks on steel girders, big war toms, little electronic glitchy bits, the whole nine yards. Brought it back for another preview the following week. broken out into four stereo stems so we could dissect it and mute elements right there in the edit bay.

"What the hell is this? This isn't what I said!"

???????

"Okay, play me the first stem." (drums) "Hate it. Play me the second stem." (synth pulses) "Hate it. Play me the third stem." (discordant brass swells) "Hate it. Play me the fourth stem." (Hermann-esque staccato strings "chomps and whomps") "THERE it is. What is THAT instrument?!?"

"Uhhhhh.... that's the orchestra, sir. Specifically, strings."

"THAT'S what I want. Have that instrument play the rhythms from the drums."

So he had demonstrated that he wanted NO drums, and did so by playing a drum solo on his thighs. What he really wanted was a Hermann-esque, chomps+whomps style rhythmic piece played with staccato strings in a small ensemble, with NO DRUMS, and what I had brought in was a freaking drum solo of doom. 

But he didn't even have the musical vocabulary to explain the difference between drums and strings, or even to identify that what he was hearing that he DID like was strings.

So I went back, removed 80% of the drums, kept the brass swells, and built out a crazy strings performance that mimicked the energy, pace, and asymmetrical feel of my drum solo. All was well, they loved it, job done. But it was a week lost going around the block with a truckload of drums.

Now, to be fair, it's not dude's job to tell me what instrument to use for what part - it's my job to interpret what he's saying and come up with a solution. But it was pretty comical to sit through a seven-minute thigh-drums performance from him, thinking he wanted a big drums piece, and then discover that it was supposed to be strings... and to never once hear the words, "No drums" or "I want strings only" - and to have him hear the strings and go, "THERE... what is THAT instrument?" when he finally heard the strings chomps that he liked.

The producer was apologetic: "He's kind of a maniac, sorry about that." but I was like, "Not a problem, that's what we're here for, sorry about the drum solo." 

Moral of the story = musical terminology would not have helped in this discussion, and might have even muddied the waters and confused the issue even further. If I had said "Strings?" he'd have been like, "What's a string?" If I'd said, "You think odd time signatures maybe?" he'd have been like, "What's a time signature?" 

I also learned that sitting quietly during his performance, making occasional eye contact with the beleaguered producer sitting behind dude, and biting my tongue didn't help. I should have started singing along with his thigh-drum solo, mimicking strings chomps in hopes that he'd say either "Shut up!" or "Hell yeah, like that!"


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## wonshu (Feb 9, 2021)

What I constantly hear is:

- at this point, we need to pickup speed, so some element needs to start

- build towards this frame

- at this frame stop the tempo and float.

If you get the other people involved into thinking and articulating this way, and also thinking about your musical elements this way, and just mute things, or bring in stuff from other themes, it suddenly becomes kind of easy to deal with the process.

However, this requires to write and produce music before and ideally get it to the picture editing well ahead of the usual schedule. So in a way, write the temp music for the project, then work it to picture.

A luxury, yes. But once filmmakers get used to this process they will love it.


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## ReDiRoma (Feb 9, 2021)

charlieclouser said:


> Yes, avoid musical terminology if at all possible. I did remember another horror story of mis-communication:
> 
> Thriller feature, final act. One character breaking into a house at night to get the macguffin, bad guy comes home and seven-minute hide-n-seek, cat-n-mouse game ensues. Needs big energy, big tension, big thrills. I built a crazy elaborate tempo and meter map that matched the picture exactly. Plenty of stops, starts, tempo ramps, a few bars of 7/8 or 5/4 here and there, the whole works. It was awesome. So I populated it with small, tense percussion and discordant brass swells, as one does. Played it for the producer, the "head of screen music" at one of the big studios (not an indie film).
> 
> ...


#drum solo of doom 
omg.


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## charlieclouser (Feb 9, 2021)

wonshu said:


> What I constantly hear is:
> 
> - at this point, we need to pickup speed, so some element needs to start
> 
> ...


OMG if I'd ever heard such perceptive, detailed instructions about how to approach a scene I would be so happy. Usually it's the inverse - it's me saying, "Does anyone else think we should build towards this frame, then stop and float? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?" and getting replies like, "Yeah, I guess that might work. Give it a try and we'll see..."

So then I usually go home and do another unwanted and inappropriate drum solo for no reason.


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## dgburns (Feb 9, 2021)

Oh were we supposed to be serious ?


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## wonshu (Feb 9, 2021)

I'm sorry... I was being serious.

That is my experience of the past couple of years.

Before that it was the same as everyone says.

But here's hoping that things can change...


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## Rob Elliott (Feb 9, 2021)

I am another temp score lover - if just to know WHICH ballpark the creative's brain is in (Detroit or New York). THEN I asked a bazillion non-musical questions to get us to 'behind 3rd' or 'bleachers in center field' in given ballpark. Making any ASSUMPTIONS on how he/she defines the color blue has gotten me into rev groundhog day. :( Ask questions of clarification to almost the point of irritation. Unless you LOVE the process of re-writing. 

temp score (they love or at least really like) = 'a picture worth a 100*1* words'.

(of course this does not exclude running 'contrasting' or 'juxtaposed' ideas by them. But even with that I don't spend a whole day putting a 3-5 min cue together, but usually send them 20-30 seconds of the idea to take their temperature....)


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## Paul Grymaud (Feb 10, 2021)

Composer-Director-Producer relationships​It seems everything's fine











The Producer The Director The Composer


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## Jonas.Ingebretsen (Feb 16, 2021)

charlieclouser said:


> I have tons of stories of when things went well - from "Just do what you do, man." (SAW franchise) to the show runner who liked to limit his instructions to me to four syllables or less: "Big big fun fun" (slo-mo low-angle casino walk-through) or "Make us all cry" (she's telling him she had a miscarriage) or "Dead serious" (there's a bomb in the casino).
> 
> I have fewer stories (well, one) of when things didn't go so well, and I might have told it on here already. It's an example of what can happen when poor communication with the composer goes wrong and costs everyone time and energy.
> 
> ...


As a commercial director, this is sadly true.


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## SamC (Feb 24, 2021)

charlieclouser said:


> One time-saver I've used on tv series that go for multiple seasons is to create a toolbox of "act end" elements that can be dropped on top of an existing cue to turn it into an "act out" that leads into a commercial break. When I'd built an "act end" cue that everyone liked, I'd bounce all the non-musical elements to audio, and make all the files exactly the same length (like 15 seconds or whatever), and I'd do this whenever I created a new act end cue, always bouncing to exactly the same length.


Man, that’s a great tip!


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## dgburns (Feb 24, 2021)

charlieclouser said:


> »Give it a try and we'll see..."


Those are the seven dreaded ‘words of death‘ to any living composer. It’s right out of the Producer handbook manual, chapter 3, paragraph 4. 

It’s code for ‘ you may be required to rewrite this cue a few times at 3 am in the morning the night before delivery due’.

It ranks right up there with the ‘we don’t know what we want, but we’ll know it when we hear it’. 

lols


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