Film Music Resources: Composing for Film

An interview with Jeanine Cowen, composer, entrepreneur and owner of the film and video scoring firm, JMC Music, Inc.

A daily blog with small hints, tricks and advices concerning the creation of music especially for film. These hints cover the fields of composition, orchestration and film scoring but also things concerning the workflow in this field, like the working relationship between composer and director etc.

This paper discusses some common assumptions made about the emotional effects of film scores.

A collection of articles, multimedia presentations, tutorials, links, and other resources

From the WikiBooks site: Movie Making Manual

Some tips and advice taken from Film Score Monthly

A high-level master's degree program designed to accommodate the aspirations of composers wishing to specialize in music scoring for film and other audio-visual representations.

The course features scores from the biggest composers in Hollywood—scores that are typically not available publicly. The musical examples include composers such as John Williams, Aaron Zigman, Alan Sylvestri, Marco Beltrami, James Newton Howard, Pinar Toprak, James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, and Alf Clausen who composed a piece specifically for this course! The goal of the course is to give you a thorough understanding of the compositional styles used in Hollywood projects, in addition to arming you with a 10-piece portfolio of film and TV music that you can use as demos.

The curriculum in Film Scoring includes intensive professional training integrally linked to the Music Composition and Music Technology programs, thus offering a vast range of artistic and academic training and unmatched possibilities for individual exploration and development. The composition faculty, having contributed to well over 100 feature films and garnering numerous Guggenheim Fellowships, includes Ira Newborn, Michael Patterson, David Spear, Marc Consoli and Julia Wolfe. Industry guests routinely present seminars and have included Leonard Rosenmann (Rebel Without a Cause), Buddy Baker (The Fox and the Hound), David Shire (Taking of Pelham 1-2-3), and Marco Beltrami (Terminator 3).

Each summer, Sundance Institute holds two Labs for composers, one focusing on feature film, the other on documentaries. Both Labs provide a group of talented composers with valuable first-hand experience composing for film.

A two-year program that trains composers in both live and electro-acoustic music for the moving image in a production context closely modelled on Industry working practices.

The MFA program in Film Music Composition at the School of Filmmaking offers a unique opportunity for the nascent film composer to fully collaborate in a working production and postproduction environment with student filmmakers. Student composers will have the opportunity to score numerous student productions over the course of the two-year program, while honing their musical and compositional skills. Film Music Composition students will take courses specifically designed to equip the composer with a variety of skills, including digital and analog recording, orchestrating, conducting, the film music business, scoring for feature film, television and new media, and collaborating with directors, producers, editors and musicians.

Bristol is famous as a film-making city, and the University Music Department's fine reputation for Composition has been strengthened since 1994 by the international standing of this course.

The program provides professional training in the practice and ideas of composing for screen media. Core teaching covers the technological bases, along with academic and critical perspectives, taught by in-house experts; and units in television and film scoring taught by guest composers active in the professional world.

SMPTV is a one-year graduate certificate program located in the center of the Los Angeles film and television community. As a professional program, in a unique collaborative setting on the USC campus, we work closely with the USC School of Cinematic Arts. To this end, we currently compose and produce music for 14 different courses in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, ranging from live action narratives and documentaries to animation and video games.