Music To Picture

With more TV channels, video and DVD producers and fledgling filmmakers than ever before, there has never been a better time to get into writing and editing music for the moving image. Paul Wiffin explores the techniques involved.

Years ago the whole process of scoring to picture was a labour-intensive, big-team effort. It could only really be financed by big studios and television companies, many of which kept their own orchestras on permanent salaries and had huge recording studios called scoring stages to accommodate them. Of course, the big blockbusters still get scored this way, with big studios such as Air Lyndhurst and Abbey Road as busy as ever recording scores for Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Ridley Scott’s latest epic. But even many of these scores start life as a MIDI file on a computer, and that’s certainly how all the orchestral parts get refined, altered as the cues get changed and printed out. The armies of copyists who used to sit there scribbling notes across manuscript paper every time a change was made in the length or arrangement of a cue have, for the most part, been replaced by a couple of guys manipulating a score package on computers.

This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 10
Filed under General Features

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