Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

On Friday, May 30th, the annual conference hosted by Filmmakers Collaborative in New England will feature a panel discussing the future of film music. I’ll be hosting the panel of industry veterans to talk about how things have changed in the last 5 - 10 years. If you are a filmmaker wondering how to approach music for your film or if you are a composer wondering how music and scores are being completed for films these days be sure to stop by.

The Making Media Now conference has always been a great event for Boston and I’m sure this year will be even better.

Music for Film 2.0

1:30pm-3:00pm

Music for a film can present a daunting task to film directors and producers. Licenses, copyrights and contracts must be considered, as well as the individuals responsible for creating and/or editing the music. As we move forward into more collaborative creative environments, how has the relationship between the director and the music for their films changed? A panel comprised of industry veterans that have embraced new technologies and capabilities will investigate the move away from traditional music work flows and into a more flexible model. A look at the pros and cons of current practices will be considered as well as a look back at what worked in a fixed framework. Long-distance collaboration, non-locked pictures, international recording sessions, new licensing schemes and contracts will be among the topics discussed.

Panelists: Bill Elliott , Berklee College of Music; Tom Phillips, OBT Music; Alison Plante, Center for Digital Imaging Arts; Roland Tec, Pinkplot Productions. Moderated by Jeanine Cowen, Assistant Vice President, Berklee College of Music.

One of the most tedious tasks in the game audio world is re-naming a large number of files to conform to a set format. Something like “fs_male_gravel_01.wav” and “fs_male_gravel_02.wav”, etc. There have been many batch processors over the years but there are times when you might be away from your main audio workstation and you want to rename the files from within ProTools.

This is a fairly easy task, but some of my students have been surprised at the results they get. Understanding the way in which Pro Tools will apply the new names can clear up the confusion. Here we see a simple session with four edited footstep regions.

One might assume that a renaming command would name these files from top to bottom in the tracks view. However, Pro Tools doesn’t look at the track order when renaming, it looks at the order of the regions in the Region Bin/List! If we were to rename these 4 regions the naming order from top to bottom would be 3, 1, 4, 2 based on their order to the left in the region list. If you sort your region list by a known parameter you can force the renaming to operate in the way you want. Watch what happens when we sort our list by name, like this :

After we run the Auto Rename function we get this :

Notice the order on the regions. If you look at the track view only you see the rename function ordered the regions 1, 3, 2, 4. Take a look again at the original and then how the regions were ordered in the region list. I hope it makes sense now!

Using the PT ordering function you can effectively order almost any region list to obtain the sort of functionality you need on your project. In this example you can see that I’m sorting by Timestamp :

Which in turn, makes the rename function order the regions in the track view as 3, 1, 4, 2!

I used to always export my regions/files for renaming functions in other applications, but given ProTools fairly robust functionality, the need for that is less. Just keep an eye on your region list and it should all start making more sense!

Last week the Berklee Learning Center hosted it’s annual networking event for the Boston/New England film community. This is an evening session that is held to bring together filmmakers and those people that do audio and music for film. It continues to grow each year! (and I see a few friends in the crowd here!)

Built as both a networking event and an expo, the participants meet each other and also learn what they each do. Filmmakers speak about making films and composers and engineers discuss creating sound for those films.

If you’d like to find out more and see additional pictures go to the official website!

Berklee is an amazing place to be everyday. About 4000 students, 400 faculty and just as many staff, basically almost 5000 people who love music. Everyday I talk about, think about and am immersed in some form of musical thought. The point is, where else in the world can you walk the halls of an institution and hear conversations about Serialism, Shostakovich, Coltrane and Kanye West? I think it is because of this musical diversity and earnest thought about music that we attract some of the most talented people in the industry.

Dan Carlin is one of those people. He has stepped into the role of Chair of the Film-Scoring department, at a time when the craft of writing music for visuals has never been more exciting. He is taking on the ever changing role of film composition, as well as new media, and looking at how Berklee can continue to provide the best education and training for students that love the craft.

The local NPR radio station knows a good thing when they see it. WBUR recently interviewed Dan for the Here and Now show. In this segment he talks about some of the classic film scores and what makes a good film score.