As you may or may not know, I am just recently a sophomore at Columbia College Chicago. I have finished my first year as a freshman at Columbia. During this past year as a Freshman, I tried to take advantage of what most college kids wouldn’t do, or wouldn’t think of doing. I contacted as many people as I could about trying to get into auditing a Film Scoring Master class. It took a couple of emails, and a couple of times going to the film scoring lab to finally get the email of someone that could help me out with auditing a scoring class. As an undergrad, my major is composition, but what I really want to do is film scoring, and I just couldn’t wait anymore for a class that taught film scoring. I’d like to thank Gary Chang and David McHugh for my chance to audit the film scoring Masters class at Columbia College Chicago.
While sitting in on the class, I believe the most emphasized thing Gary talked about was dynamics. He emphasized how you should use dynamics to ease in and out especially for a score that’s gentle and supposed to be sad. He also emphasized building up to the most dramatic point. A lot of people while starting out with composing or film scoring, tend to play music at the same levels with hardly any dynamics. Even when performers are playing a song you can sometimes notice how they never use dynamics. I feel as though sometimes people never really notice when they are or aren’t using dynamics. We also discussed different plug-ins and softwares during the classes which helped me choose protools for my choice of software. Two other key things I learned during this class was that silence is as important as the music is in a film. While scoring the film ’60 BPM,’ the director wanted music throughout the whole thing, but I went against that, and had silence in a certain spot where the girl was waiting for the end results of her performance. The other key thing I learned was that the melody should always be louder than the other instruments. You want it to resonate and have a lasting effect on the audience. If you don’t have that lasting effect, people won’t remember it. Simplicity is also always good. You don’t want everything to be too complex. Simplicity is what sticks the most.
