Composer

What they do

The job begins with a brief and a picture. On animation that can be as early as the animatic, because music changes the timing of the edit and getting the composer in late costs the whole cut. On drama it is usually a locked or near-locked picture. A spotting session with the director and music editor fixes where cues start and stop and what each one is for, and produces a cue list with timings and a name for every piece. Then writing, mostly at a computer with a MIDI keyboard and a large sample library, building mockups that have to be convincing enough to approve even though they are not the final performance. Themes are attached to characters and ideas, then varied, so a return means something rather than repeating. Revisions are constant and structural: the cue is now four seconds shorter, the scene was recut, the emotion needs to arrive later. If there is budget the score is orchestrated, copied and recorded with players, conducted to a click or to picture, then mixed with a score mixer; if not, the samples are the record. Delivery includes stems for the dub and a cue sheet listing every piece of music, which is what lets royalty bodies pay everyone involved.

What they decide

The calls that belong to this role and no other.

• The musical language: instrumentation, harmonic world, and whether there are themes at all
• What each cue is doing dramatically, proposed to the director who approves it
• Where a cue starts and stops inside the spotted range, and where to argue for no music
• Whether the score is played, sampled, or a hybrid, within the music budget
• How themes are varied and when they return

Principles of the craft

• Score the subtext, not the picture: if the music says what the image already says, it is decoration. A cue's real subject is usually what the character will not say out loud.
• Silence is a cue: choosing where music does not play shapes a film as much as writing does. Wall-to-wall score has nowhere left to arrive from.
• A theme is only a theme if it changes: a recognisable tune restated identically is a jingle. Meaning comes from variation, the same shape in a minor mode, on one instrument, too slowly.
• Enter late, leave early: most cues can start a beat later and end a beat sooner than instinct says, and both moves make the music feel motivated by the scene rather than laid over it.
• Write for the mix, not just the room: the score will be balanced against dialogue and effects. A cue whose emotional weight lives in the same frequency range as the voice will be turned down, so put the weight where there is space.
• Temp music is the argument you have to win: whatever the director has been hearing for months is the reference. Work out what the temp is doing dramatically and do that better, rather than imitating the record.

Common mistakes

• Writing to timecode rather than to the scene, hitting every action until the score is mickey-mousing
• Delivering a mockup that only works as a mockup, then losing its impact when real players arrive
• Ignoring where the dialogue sits, so the best-written cue is buried at the dub
• Starting and ending every cue on a picture cut
• Not keeping sessions and stems organised for the revision that is certainly coming
• The competent composer's mistake: writing a genuinely good piece of music that does not serve the scene, and then defending it

How to learn it

Exercises and routes in, not a reading list.

• Score the same two-minute scene three ways: one theme on a solo instrument, one with no melody at all using only texture and pulse, and one with no music for the first ninety seconds. Play all three to someone and ask what the character wanted.
• Take a cue you have written and cut four seconds out of the middle so it still lands on the same picture hit. This is the note you will receive most often in your career.
• Write one theme, then five variations. Play the theme to a listener once, then play the variations and see which ones they still recognise.
• Write a cue for a dialogue scene, then mix it under the dialogue yourself. Note what you had to abandon, then rewrite the cue so you do not have to abandon it.
• Score a scene against its temp track, then score the same scene having never heard the temp. Compare how much of the first version was the temp's idea rather than yours.