How much time do you give composers?

Hello new dude
So you'll be doing 8-10 minutes of music in 5 days? You have to create about a minute and a half or two minutes of music a day while working your day job? That isn't a typical schedule, but you're working on a student film. If you dedicate effort and time, it could work. I'd recommend taking a few days off of your day job though.

So have themes and the basic soundscape approved by the director beforehand. That way you just need to "flesh it out" once you get the first cut.


Not quite the same thing, but I once worked for a broadcast music firm in the mid-80's. We would put out cattle calls for commercials, promo and ident music. The composers had 18 to 24 hours to compose and record their submissions; granted they were only 15 to 60 seconds, but they had to be broadcast quality when we received them. Clients such as Discovery Channel, Disney, Coca-Cola, etc. would pick their favorite from our submissions (we would pick 10 favorites from our stable of 40+ composers). What makes it interesting is there was no internet; we would call the composer, fax the client requirements to them, and we would have to receive their submission to us on DAT tape by 8:30am next morning (first Fed-Ex of the day). So, in reality, most of them had only six (6) to ten (10) hours to compose, record, mix and master. One of my jobs was to take our selections, make a master DAT and run off a pristine cassette copy for the client and get that to Fed-Ex. 90% of the time the original submissions for commercials and promos was what went on-air.

BTW, I would go home, work all night and have my own submission about 50% of the time. The reason it was only half of the time is that the other 50% of the time I was gigging, although a couple of times I would get home from the gig at 3am or 4am and try to complete something by 7am - it never worked out too well those mornings.

You'll get awesome schedules and you'll get crap schedules. I'm working a day job; usually I can get a short done in about a week (depending on the number of revisions). Hell, my favorite short I did in a day. I had to do a feature in a month; that was pretty tight, but most features I've done have given me about 2 months.

As Alcove says, do as much prep work as you can. Write some themes from the script, if possible (sometimes seeing the actual film, all that goes out the window, but you can always save it to pull out later, which is always a good plan).

And if you *really* want a challenge, do the 48 hour film project. It's a great exercise (though by necessity you're almost always scoring from the script). Best of luck!

That's a really tight schedule. I think it would make lot of sense for you to have some themes and ideas worked out without ever having seen any footage.