Posts tagged: ramble
Dear Distinguished Client,
How are you? Or, wait, first of all who are you?
You’re a budding director working on your first project. You’re an established one. You make short films. Documentaries. Blockbusters. You wear shades and walk tall.
You’re a game designer trying to put together that crucial breakout team. You have a vision. You’re starting with a mod before you embark on your first “real” game project. You need good and passionate people.
You’re pretty awesome, in short. I want to be just like you when I grow up. Or…almost. See, there’s something that’s been bothering me and I’m an honest kind of guy, so I wanted to bring it up. Just between you and me, just as a sort of FYI. I mean it’s all been said before, but some things are worth re-stating, you know?
I come from a film and media schooling background, so I know what it means to have to put together a film or game project on a shoestring budget. I know it’s hard and frustrating, and I also know that it’s exciting and engrossing. So exciting that you’re willing to do it without getting any compensation for it, because you’re just that selfless and passionate. That right there is truly admirable dedication. The problem is that just because you are willing and able to do your part for free, doesn’t mean you can expect that the rest of your team is in the same position.
Part of that shoestring budget needs to be set aside for making sure that each and every member of your team — not just me, the composer — gets compensation for their work. Their time is valuable to them and invaluable to your project. Their work is what brings your vision to life, so even if you can only pay each person $10, you really should. It’s the gesture that counts. We’re all trying to forge long-lasting work relationships here with talented and driven people, and that doesn’t work if your team doesn’t feel appreciated.
Now I often talk to other young composers and they ask me questions about their first gigs and whether or not they’re getting ripped off. There’s a really funny little clause that pops up in most work offers these days and it’s an extremely perplexing one. It goes something like this:
“This is a small project, so we can’t pay you, but we’re offering full credit and a free copy of the final product as compensation.”
I’m sorry, what?
Credit and a free copy is excellent, but it’s not compensation. It’s common courtesy. If you use someone’s art in your production, stating where you got it from in the credits isn’t some special negotiable honour you’re doing them, it’s the most fundamental tenet of working with creative content. It’s basic attribution of effort. It’s the law, in point of fact, and so trying to spin it as some sort of favour is disingenuous.
The point isn’t that you always need to pay your people though. You should whenever humanly possible, even if it’s just with pizza and beer, but I know that sometimes there isn’t even a shoestring budget. It’s a guerilla-style effort. That is also totally fine. I’ve done plenty of work for free over the years, and I continue to do work for free, but only for people who — despite having no budget — truly appreciate the efforts of their team, who inspire them to great artistic achievement, and who are putting together a product that allows everyone’s work to shine, or delivers an important message, or is moving, or is simply beautiful.
If you show me something that’s truly spectacular and visionary, or unassuming but powerful, I will want to do my best to help you. I want to participate in your opus. In return, you’re not going to offer me credit and a free copy — that part is understood. Instead, you’re going to shrug and say “M, we don’t have any money. It’s just my friends and me. We may make some money down the road if people like it, but I’m making no promises. The point is to bring this film/game/etc into the world. We love your stuff, we think you could really nail the vibe we’re looking for, so if you have some spare time, we’d love for you to join us.”
…Where do I sign? No problem, done deal, my pleasure. Simple as that. It’s about presentation. And just like you’re not going to “offer” me copy & credit, I’m not going to give you a bunch of pre-made library tracks I’ve got lying around on my harddrive. I’m going to go all out and give you the best custom score I can. Always. If you have an ambitious and cool project on your hands, then I will do my best to make you sound good. Why? Because not only will it then make me look good, but we’ll forge a working relationship. And down the road, maybe I’ll need your help for something. Maybe you’ll be hugely successful and have another, bigger project — with a budget, perhaps — that you need my help for. I’ve got your back.
Ultimately, I do what I do because I love making music. I love making music for your projects, in fact. Helping bring a story to life, helping highlight and augment the work of other artists. Unfortunately, keeping up with the bleeding edge of the tools that facilitate my work is not free. And my time isn’t either. Neither is yours, and neither is anyone else’s on your team. Sometimes we all need to do charity work, but let’s make sure we don’t get confused: it is not the norm.
Anyway, you’ve got a meeting to get to, so I won’t keep you. Just wanted to put that out there, see how you were doing, wish you well. Good luck at that place with those people, you’ll blow them away. And give me a call if you’re free this weekend, maybe we can grab a coffee or something, I want to hear all about your new project…
Yours sincerely,
M
It’s been a busy few weeks, so pardon me while I screw my head back on and regroup a bit here.
The GCFC Match-Up went exceedingly well — beyond even my wildest expectations. Working with a real orchestra, and a talented one, is an unimaginable treat, and I have to give a special thanks to Darren Fung and Victor Davies from the GCFC and Dennis Patterson from the Glenn Gould Recording Studio at the CBC Headquarters for being so supportive, helpful, and encouraging throughout the process. I could go into wild details about the proceedings and the process of scoring the film, but I’ve already done that here, so take a look if you’re interested.
Since the match-up, I’ve been keeping busy with a healthy combination of schoolwork and musical experimentation. I was recently called up to do a spec track for a company that may or may not end up engaging my services down the road, and since I hate to update without having some music to share, I offer you all a chance to take a listen:
The track has also gone up on my demo reel if you prefer checking it out there. Speaking of which — and I know I’ve already gushed about this on Twitter — I already have over 1000 plays on SoundCloud since switching the demo reel over to it! All I can say is that I’m honoured and humbled that so many people are listening to my work; I truly hope you’re enjoying it! If you are, remember to follow me on Twitter so you can keep up to date with fresh news…I update that a lot more frequently than this Journal, I’m ashamed to admit.
Okay okay, I’ll get to the “pleasant honking” bit. I don’t have a new technique for surreptitious molesting. I’m sorry. I do, however, have a new instrument that I’m thrilled to be playing! I recently inherited a clarinet (his name is Melvin, it says so on his case — Melvin the Magnificent, to be precise) and have been thoroughly enjoying the process of trying to learn to make passable sounds on him without any formal instruction.
Incidentally, I’m not schizophrenic.
I am proud to report that I was (fairly inconsistently) making proper clarinet noises after about half an hour, and now, several days on, I can play some pretty respectable little riffs. My bigger interest lies in the variety of wild and unusual sounds I can get out of the instrument though, which thus far has yielded some, uh, interesting sample recordings. Turns out Melvin does a pretty good Duduk impression.
Anyhow, back to work. Thanks for checking in! :)
How are those New Years resolutions holding up, people?
I don’t make any, so I can’t offer you my own answer, but I can say that this has already been a year of new beginnings for me — and it’s only been half a month! After a 5 year pause, I’ve finally taken up my Kung Fu training again which is making me feel very good and physically refreshed. I did 7 years leading up into my highschool years and then the studio closed, so I’ve been waiting ever since to find a new place that I like…I think this one is it.
In musical news, I’ve been gifted with a marvelous opportunity by the wonderful GCFC (Guild of Canadian Film Composers). They’ve set up a partnership program between them and the CFC wherein a number of applicants (composers) are paired up with emerging directors from the CFC (Canadian Film Centre) every year to score a small exercise and have it performed and recorded with a live orchestra! This year, I was among the 4 chosen from across Canada to participate, and am absolutely thrilled to be working on a wonderful and dramatic segment of film. I had my spotting session with the director yesterday afternoon and have promptly buried my nose in the footage to begin immersing myself in it. I figured that I should let the world know though before hiding away in the studio again…so here’s me sharing what is truly an amazing opportunity for which I am very grateful to the GCFC.
I cannot actually show the video, but once the score is written and recorded, you can bet that the audio will be up on my demo reel for your listening enjoyment. Expect something minimalistic and challenging…the film is pretty intense stuff!
Another interesting development is that I am mourning the loss of my old phone. The wonderful Samsung E747F that served me so well for two years has finally keeled over and died — after a prolonged period of erratic behaviour, decreasing battery life, and other strange manifestations of senility. Indulgence is a good cure for grief, and so I indulged…which is to say that I’m now the happy owner of an iPhone. Actually, I had to leave my old service provider and switch to a new one just to be able to get it without paying an arm and my firstborn child (long story short: apparently service loyalty is not as valuable as I expected…). In any case, I have been enjoying the myriad bounties of the App Store and the fun and friendly interface of the phone. If you were planning on getting in touch but didn’t up until now, please reconsider — give me a call! I’m always happy to hear from people and it’s an excuse to use all the free minutes I get this month with the new phone.
…But I will never forget you, dear Samsung.
Also: my review of Brothers, by Thomas Newman, went up on Tracksounds so you are welcome to check it out. If you’re interested in my views on more scores, make sure to look back in the archives too, there’ve been a bunch of other reviews that I didn’t post about here.
Anyhow, it’s back to the manuscript for me — I’ll check in soon!
It snowed the other day. I was half expecting this to be another soggy and ugly winter, but it seems that we may yet get a picturesque and cold — an honest and proper — winter, which I’m happy about even though I’m not a huge fan of cold weather.
The Time Traveler premiere was a lot of fun, and the private screening before it went to air was neat too….it’s interesting to meet the actors in person after one has been staring at them on a screen for so many hours. Turns out they actually exist! With TTT finished for now, I’m happily on the lookout for new and interesting projects to work on, and that will hopefully mean some more time for me to do site updates as well now that the wonderful holidays are here and I have some free time (theoretically) to kill.
I’ve been doing pretty frequent SoundCast discussions over at www.tracksounds.com, so you may want to check those out. It’s a great podcast and we discuss many topical issues that would concern fans of film and game scores. Plus, there are always neat contests going on where you can win free scores, and that’s always a good thing.
If something looks different, it’s because I’ve added a live chat function to the site (look up to your right) that you can use to chat with me if I’m around the studio when you’re browsing the site. It’s a neat feature and along with it I’ll also be putting up a new track or two on the Demo Reel, so make sure to take a listen. This is the holiday season though, and in the spirit of…er…madness, I guess, I’ve created a piece that brings together the joys of kazoos, a choir on helium, and a healthy does of my inner Danny Elfman. Enjoy responsibly:
That’s all for now, happy holidays!
After a long and tedious weekend of preparing stems and other such things, I can proudly say that the Time Traveler score is completed! Very exciting to see it all come together and I can’t wait to be able to share some excerpts. For now though, there’s other interesting news on the horizon…
Besides some exciting new projects coming up in the musical world, I also have some fairly significant website tweaks planned, so expect to see those popping up in the fairly-near future. Among them is a live resume (courtesy of the wonderful iPaper plugin from Scribd), which has already made its way to the main navigation menu up there. Unfortunately, the default zoom level can’t be changed for the plugin, so I can’t make it so that you don’t need to scroll to see the whole resume, but it’s a small price to pay for the coolness of having it up and available. I’m hoping to add a link to my business card underneath as well. There’s more coming besides that though, including some cosmetic facelifts (better typography, I choose you!), the long-lost video section of the portfolio, and a pretty big expansion of networking connections and links to all my myriad profiles all over the internet so that people can get and stay in touch with me more conveniently.
To celebrate the completion of the Time Traveler score, I decided that some serious percussion was in order, and so late last night I threw together this little percussive thingy and gave it a title that I feel does an excellent job of encompassing my mindset at that ungodly hour:
Bam bam! Alright, enough of that. I’m off to continue my recent venture into the amazingly complex world of deep synthesis fun, so until next time, adieu, and keep on the lookout for more random site updates as time wears on!
It’s been a fairly crazy few months in Marius land, hence the lack of updates, but I can’t leave everyone in the dark forever so here’s an idea of what I’ve been up to…
Remember that TV gig? Well, I am working hard on scoring the pilot episode as we speak. The Time Traveler (www.thetimetraveler.tv) will hit the broadcast waves sometime later this fall if all goes according to schedule. I can’t show off any music from it for now, but I’m enjoying the process and exploring some new avenues of sound design and instrument manipulation to get the unusual, ethereal, and haunting soundscape just right. Expect more news about this as time goes on.
In other news, I’m now the proud owner of Andrew Keresztes’s fabulous new sampled string library, LASS (www.audiobro.com). I cannot express my love of this library enough, it makes writing for sampled strings a completely different experience. Of course, I also had to do some serious RAM augmenting to my setup to be able to make proper use of it, but it was completely and utterly worth it. For the sake of example, here’s a recent piece put together in an afternoon with my newly revised and expanded orchestral template — including the wonderful LASS library:
I’ve got some new reviews up on tracksounds.com as well, with more on the way. I even got to interview Theodore Shapiro about Year One, which was great. Speaking of talking to composers, my girlfriend and I just recently got back from a quick, one-week, pre-schoolyear sojourn to sunny California where, among other things, I got to meet Christopher Lennertz and chill out with him and Tim Wynn for a bit at their studio. SonicFuel is a great place, and you’d be hard-pressed to find friendlier or more welcoming and generous people. I have pictures to prove it too!
Time to get back to writing, but I promise to be more regular and random with my news postings. See you all soon!
Excitement!
And lots to show as well. Before I get into showing some recent work though, I should mention that the iPhone game project I mentioned vaguely last time is indeed underway and I’m very much enjoying working on the music — it’s similar to Spitfire’s, except more developed since I have more tracks to spread the material over. In addition, I’m pursuing a potential television pilot scoring opportunity that I’m excited about. Interview tomorrow. Apprehension today. Hopefully I will return with good news.
Visitors to my portfolio page will have noticed a project in there called The Moonlight Path. I’ve been involved with this mod of Neverwinter Nights 2 for some years now. As a mod, progress is slow, and the music that I had originally written for it no longer stands up to my current standards and so I have been slowly re-working or, more accurately, re-writing all the pieces from scratch to bring them up to my new quality standards of writing and production.
Among them has been the main title theme, which is what I’m sharing today. This theme (in its original form) is one of the first real things I ever wrote for a game, which gives it a lot of nostalgic value for me. I had a lot of fun revisiting it after so much time and breathing some new life into it. This time around, I approached it a bit more tastefully than in the original (I feel) and it’s resulted in a more well-rounded presentation of the material.
As a title theme, it doesn’t do a whole lot in the way of actually developing the thematic material too far, but this is intentional — I’m just presenting it here. The rest of the score’s job is to visit new themes and develop these ones at length.
It’s a really large ensemble, which presented some mixing challenges, but I’m very happy with the result and so is the developer. I’m hoping you guys will like it too:
The other neat little project I worked on recently was an animation for a colleague’s final university project. The clip itself tells the story of a Chinese warrior whose soul is summoned to the afterlife, but he decides he’d much rather see his girlfriend one last time — it’s quite cute. Tim Mehmet, the creator, did a really good job with the animation; I had fun scoring it and I wish him the best of luck as he pursues his game art degree. You can check out the video here, and eventually on my ever-elusive video portfolio page…
That’s all for now: composing calls!
Hi guys,
Sorry for the site downtime over the past day and a half. My host had some issues with the server and I had to wait to be able to get it up and running again. Everything should be back and alive again now though. Still no video samples to show in the portfolio, I’m afraid, but in the meantime I wanted to share a fresh piece of music that I wrote for the demo reel the other night. You can listen below and subsequently look for the piece on the Demo Reel page of the portfolio as well:
In other news, I’m looking forward to a potential iPhone game project which should be very fun. More significantly though, I’ve been featured on the latest podcast episode over at Tracksounds.com (Look HERE)! Just a quick note about the episode, the track, “Spitfire Gameplay”, that you hear is actually not from Crysis: The Lost World Returns. It’s from an independent game project called Spitfire which was an arcade military game I scored earlier in the year. In any case, a big thanks to Chris (the Tracksounds Guru) for the exposure!
Also on the Tracksounds front, I’m happy to report that I’m going to be officially contributing to the site with reviews and possibly more as time goes on, so expect my name to turn up around there more often in the future. It’s a wonderful opportunity.
That’s all for now, but keep an eye out for video clips (I hope) with the next entry!
So you know how every online journal author in the world is visited by the regular updates fairy? Yeah, I think mine had a run in with a jetliner on the way over or something.
Excuses aside though, the reason for my silence has, ironically, been largely caused by a profusion of new noise — music! — that I’ve been working on. In my last update, I mentioned that I was preparing to venture into some jazzy territory with a fellow composer’s jazz ensemble, and that came to pass. I acted as recording engineer for their first studio session and it was an absolute blast. There’s something incredibly cool about the organic texture of quasi-improvised large-ensemble jazz music.
After that, I had a brief sojourn into the world of music for advertising, which is fun. I’m hoping that I can attract more clients in that area, especially in the film trailer scene…terribly fun music to write. My most important development though is the completion of a new score for a film called Astrid.
Earlier in the year, I was contacted by an independent director looking to reserve my services for her film project a few months down the road. I agreed and in the time between the last post and this one, the film was completed, I received the footage, and created just about 20 minutes of music for the film…which is actually about its entire length. Astrid is an interesting fantasy-esque live action film and features no dialogue at all, which was both exciting and a great responsibility because it meant that my music had to convey the bulk of the sonic facet of the film and be consistent with the moods and imagery. Needless to say, I enjoyed the hell out of the work and I’m quite pleased with the result. I hope to be able to put up a sample in the portfolio ASAP.
Speaking of which, interested visitors may have noticed a continuing lack of updates to the site’s infrastructure. This is largely due to the interesting creature called “university” which eats the time of my webmaster and myself. Nevertheless, updates will start arriving soon enough (I hope) since the year is winding down. I myself am now completely finished, having written my last exam today, and I look forward to having more music-writing time as the summer approaches…
