# Film scoring practice. Need feedback!



## StevenOBrien

I'm not sure if many of you here are experienced in film scoring, but I really need as much feedback as possible on my dramatic scoring, so I figured I'd take my chances and post here anyway.






I took a scene from a 1975 bank robbery thriller called "Dog Day Afternoon" and wrote music to it, in order to practice scoring to picture. I have virtually no experience doing this (the only film I scored previously was a 4 minute student film in 2010), so I'm a little rusty on the process. Feedback and suggestions would be very much appreciated!

Clean track here:

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https://soundcloud.com/stevenobrien%2Ftense-thriller-cue-rescore-of

And if anyone's interested, here are some more compositions I've made since my last post here:
Adventurous Orchestral Piece
Waltz for Accordion
Two Romances for Piano (Set unfinished)
Piece for Harp and Flute

Thanks for listening,
-Steven


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## Ramako

I would like to start by saying that I think this is very good - I have never tried this and that I think this is much better than what I could do. Thus my feedback should be taken in the loosest terms.

My overall impression is that the music is perhaps a little too much - as in it attracts a too much notice. I think this is particularly the case between 1:10 and 1:23 where perhaps the music could be very faint; we want to be looking at the guy rather than the music and it would be quite nice if the music came back in at 1:23 when the scene changes again - which you do do. I just think more would have been nice.

But overall good job - and I think the orchestration is pretty good too.


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## nicecomposer

I thought it worked really well. Do you mind if I ask what you used to make it?


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## StevenOBrien

Ramako said:


> I would like to start by saying that I think this is very good - I have never tried this and that I think this is much better than what I could do. Thus my feedback should be taken in the loosest terms.
> 
> My overall impression is that the music is perhaps a little too much - as in it attracts a too much notice. I think this is particularly the case between 1:10 and 1:23 where perhaps the music could be very faint; we want to be looking at the guy rather than the music and it would be quite nice if the music came back in at 1:23 when the scene changes again - which you do do. I just think more would have been nice.
> 
> But overall good job - and I think the orchestration is pretty good too.


I appreciate all opinions! In my experience, sometimes the opinions of even those who know absolutely nothing about the subject are the most helpful. 

I think I'd agree with you that the music is a little overbearing for what it's accompanying, hopefully I can improve and exercise more restraint in the future.

I'm glad you found my orchestration satisfactory too!



nicecomposer said:


> I thought it worked really well. Do you mind if I ask what you used to make it?


Thanks . I wrote the score in Sibelius and used virtual MIDI cables to send the MIDI data to my DAW. I wrote up a long blog about my samples/mixing here: http://www.64digits.com/users/index.php?userid=Stevenup7002&cmd=comments&id=501029


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## nicecomposer

very nice. I've got to order those sample modeling products


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## Jord

I agree with Ramako that at times it feels a bit too much, and that the music is dominating the actual movie

but other than that i thought it was awesome and when i first started watching i actually thought it was part of the movie, great job!


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## Lunasong

Great job with changing the music every time the scene changed. I thought your score enhanced the screen action.


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