I used to hate picking temporary tracks for the score. Obviously I knew that the tracks were important, but I didn’t understand how to find them. This meant that I would often pick a track that was decent but not great to use in the editing process of a short film. Of course, over time, I would grow used to the track, and then when it finally came time to work with the composer, I had trouble envisioning any other kind of music.
I have selected all of the temporary tracks in Addict Named Hal, and I now feel that the rough cut is giving a cohesive vision for what role the score plays in the film, and the type of instrumentation and approach it will have. When I started, I was nervous to choose temp tracks, and didn’t want to trap myself as I had in previous short film projects.
A few things have helped here. One is that we cut the entire assembly with no tracks. That meant that I was very familiar with the footage - not the script, not the story, not what I thought the scene was going to be when I wrote it or shot it, but the actual footage - before I even considered adding music to it. This helped me respond to what the footage itself was offering, rather than trying to use score to force the footage to do something it wasn’t really doing.
Then, Lowell put together several score references for me. These were songs as well as score from other films. Having this smaller sample size helped me enormously, as I could click through specific tracks chosen by someone with deep knowledge of the artistic vision, rather than facing the entire world of music and trying to figure out how to look up what I wanted.
Of course, there have been many scenes that needed something that I couldn’t find in the existing score references. Here I found a new strategy completely. I thought about the mood of the specific scene (feeling isolated from others, overcoming fears at great cost, forcing yourself to do something you can’t bear to do), and then scrolled through my spreadsheet of films I’ve seen to find a film that deals with that theme well. Then, I listened to score tracks from that film. This strategy always helped me find the right track.
And most of all, I raised the bar for myself. Instead of finding a track that will work fine so that I could move on with the picture edit, I have poured hours into the process of finding the right tracks. I have not accepted tracks that aren’t quite right, and we have replaced plenty of tracks that turned out to be strange in the edit. Now that the rough cut is fully assembled, these hours have clearly paid off. While our score is still quite varied (as it’s pulled from several artists, films, and television shows), it has a clear arc throughout the film, and you can get a sense of what the score needs to do from watching this cut.
