Thanks Boris!
I had a month to do it so it took a month. This is the universal law. You are completely free to put the music where you want. You're thinking about doing it next year aren't you? I can tell.
As to process, well here goes - I might as well get it down while it's fresh in my mind:
The competition throws up a lot of challenges that you most likely wouldn’t have in an actual job. There are essentially seven cues in this piece and normally you would have a master timeline with the movie all synced up and then you would have seven copy projects, one for each cue. You do this because each cue will have its own tempo and time signature(s) and you don’t want these interfering with each other. It also keeps the project in manageable, logical chunks. For the final mix you would render out each project’s audio stems and import them into the master.
This project is different. The final full scores are performed at a concert in Zurich. This means that there can only be one timeline with all the cues. You need to create a continuous click track for the Conductor and orchestra and make sure that you have at least two bars of lead in to each tempo change to allow the orchestra to sync up to the next cue. Tempo ramps (accelerando/ritardando) can be problematic in a sync situation so are to be avoided if possible. Also it means that you can only use instruments that will be present on the day and be mindful that you have to actually write out the score.
For the writing and mock-up I used mostly Spitfire. The Symphonic Strings, Studio Brass and Woodwinds. Joey Burgess Percussion, Skaila Harp, HZ Piano. The rhythm section at the beginning is Toontrack drums and an Amplesound Jazz Bass (I can play bass but since this was going to be written out I needed the notes in the computer). I composed in Cubase, wrote out the score in Dorico and mixed the audio in Logic.
Stylistically I was going for a smooth 90’s network TV feel. Visually that’s what it felt like and it’s an orchestra after all. There are a lot of CG cartoon elements so there was going to be some Disney style Mickey-Mousing. The tone, harmonically and metrically, would have to get progressively darker as the piece progressed.
For each cue I mapped the hard and soft hits that I wanted to nail. Some points you need to hit dead-on and some you want to transition over,. I then worked out a time signature and tempo for each cue that fitted the required tone and hit the marks as near as possible. This is NOT easy. I also had to make sure there was at least two clear lead-in bars for each cue for the orchestra.
I then chose an appropriate scale scheme for each cue to get the right feel. 1M1 was faux-jazzy so it was probably Dorian with a quartal thing in the brass. 1M2 was just underscore noodling that reacted to what she was saying. 1M3 was full-on Disney Whole-Tone and then transitioned to very genre specific for the three film references. Major for the western, Mixolydian for the pirates and major triadic ‘motion by thirds’ for the SciFi. 1M4 was my Johnny Williams Witches of Eastwick inspired nonsense in Harmonic Minor, 1M5 was in 7/8 time scary Diminished, 1M6 was 20th Century atonal - stacked half-tones, and 1M7 was Bernard Hermann inspired minor motion-by-thirds.
I don’t worry much about chord progressions for this sort of project. Film music is all ‘contingent’. It only has meaning in the presence of pictures so the concern is always relative motion from situation to situation, emotion to emotion. The lack of fully realised traditional diatonic progressions is pretty well the whole deal with film music. Stories, and consequently the music, do not resolve until the very last frame or the very first kiss. There are very few Perfect Cadences in this sort fo stuff.
After I was ‘happy’ with the composition I made a copy of the project and removed any unused tracks etc. I then quantised everything to the appropriate grid (making sure to get any triplets gridded properly). I also quantised all note lengths, particularly shorts, to the right values. In Dorico I set up an orchestral template to match what I had used. You can then drag the actual MIDI tracks from Cubase to Dorico to import the notes, one instrument at a time.
Then I hit the books. This was only the second time I had produced a written score so there was a lot of study involved in getting the right markings and conventions to get what I wanted and to match the mock-up. I suspect this is where I fell down to other competitors, some of whom I know used professional orchestrators (which is totally allowed and kosher). With this being a live concert in sync with the film there has to be confidence that the orchestration is correct and playable, and I know I had one bar involving triplet rests to hit a cue dead-on that probably wasn’t!
Learned a hell of a lot and I’ll be doing it again next year.
Hope that helps.