Bear McCreary has uploaded a video from the archive, breaking down his process of scoring Battlestar Galactica. It was nice to see the process of what goes into recording orchestra and locking the final score. I have not had the privilege of working with a live orchestra so it was nice to get a glimpse of it. I work primarily with midi and field recordings. It's fun to learn about each other's methods. It was also nice to hear how Bear viewed themes and characters. In particular, his Roslin and Adama theme. It is such a great theme and extremely powerful and emotional A few questions . Do you work with live musicians? What are your go-to techniques and productivity “hacks” when scoring and locking music? Link: https://youtu.be/k8wBwuN4m5s
Composing : Breaking down the process by Shanika Freeman
Other topics in Composing:
Check out Trending Discussions
Register / Log In
Great video and very informative.
Personally I give my preference to the original score of Battlestar Galactica by Stu Phillips that I watched as a child - from 1978. That was my jam. Here is the original theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHp9oZPqs8E
This happened last night. I brought a chart (lead sheet) to class and the teacher/prof asked me to conduct. I explained how I want the ending to sound/go and we practiced it a few times. Then I conducted the whole piece. The ending did not go well as previously rehearsed. After that the prof/teacher gave us feedback. He told me "make them pay attention to you when you have them do things with your arms and hands". They never looked up from their charts during the rehearsal.
Attached is last night's chart (v5). I received feedback that will result in some tweaking of the melody and we'll try again next thu night. Having access to an 'orchestra' here in Houston is difficult as I don't attend Rice University or UofHouston. The smaller professional orchestras don't do free readings. So I learn to work with musicians by writing for small jazz ensembles and jazz big band which are not that different in terms of learning to score for and conduct ensembles. In the world of scoring for short films (I now have 35 of such IMDB credits), budgets don't seem to include live performers. BTW, I have a scored electronic arrangement of this chart ( https://soundcloud.com/joelirwin/adorable-you ), but I much prefer live scoring.
(to see a larger readable version of the chart, right click and then open the image in a new tab)