The chain from spotting session to dubbing stage, and where the decisions really get made.
I was eight when I saw Star Wars. What followed was a decade of films with big orchestral scores that put dazzling orchestration and virtuoso playing back in front of a mass audience.
That sound wasn’t invented for cinema. It was repurposed from the concert hall — Walton, Shostakovich, Bartók, and others. Worth knowing early, because the thing people picture when they say “film music” is inherited, and most of what looks like a rule turns out to be a convention somebody borrowed.
Here’s how a score actually gets made.
What I was taught, and what actually happens
Before a note is written: which scenes need music, and which are better without it. Plenty of scenes play better with almost nothing under them — the scene has already set its terms, and the score’s job is to stay out of the way of what the audience is doing with it.
I was taught that this arrives as a cue sheet — that intermediate document between director and composer, listing each cue by timecode with a note on what it needs to feel like. We were taught on real ones. The example we were given was a film about freshwater fish, where the note against the pike said to score it like a shark. Which tells you exactly what the director wanted, and it wasn’t a fish.
I was also taught, firmly, that you don’t write a note until the timings are locked.
That has never been my reality. 400 Years of the Telescope was composed before any fine cut existed, and so were many of the projects that followed. Flatland wasn’t finished either — I pre-composed the key sequences and let the music guide the edit. On Swan Cake the dance sequence was built alongside the animatics, with the timings still moving while I worked in the room next door.
So the rule was wrong, or at least it was answering the wrong question. Locked timings are not really what a composer needs. What you need is to know the function — what this music is for — and what else is going to occupy the space, whether that’s narration or major sound effects. Music written before those decisions are made doesn’t fail because the timings moved; it fails because the space was already spoken for and nobody told you.
That’s the same problem as before, one stage earlier: what should the audience hear here, and what has to move out of the way for it?
Orchestration or synthestration
Then the fork: real players, or samples, or both. Budget and schedule decide it more often than taste does, and neither answer is the lesser craft. What changes is where the detail has to live — in the parts, or in the programming.
Score preparation
The invisible stage, and the one sessions live or die by. Parts, transpositions, click, everything the players and the engineer need in order not to waste expensive minutes. One cue of mine typically runs to 40 or 50 individual A3 sheets across a 70 to 80 piece orchestra, and 400 Years of the Telescope had 33 cues — all prepared and printed from my home studio, with a small army of helpers to proofread and organise it for the recording day. Nobody in the audience will ever know this stage exists. Get it wrong and they’ll hear the consequences anyway.
Recording
I’ve recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road, the Prague Metropolitan Orchestra at Smecky, and the Budapest Film Orchestra. A session moves fast and costs by the minute, so decisions arrive at a rate that has nothing to do with composing.
Players also hand you things you didn’t write. On Dinosaurs at Dusk I asked more virtuoso playing of the orchestra than I had before, and got it.
The dubbing stage
Last, the music meets dialogue and effects, and the mix decides who carries each moment. Cues get dropped here. Sitting in on Alan Silvestri’s sessions for Shawn Levy at the Newman Stage, I watched a beautifully orchestrated cue for a giant octopus coming alive out of a picture get dropped in favour of something simpler. Another scene had horns added to make it feel more presidential.
That’s not waste. It’s the last place the film gets to choose, and the film is what everyone was serving.
Getting into it
There’s no single route. Mine went through a Master’s in Composition for Film and TV at Ealing Studios, studying with Rodney Newton and Nick Ingman, and a long apprenticeship of listening to how the masters wrote for every section.
If there’s any value in setting all this down, it’s that flexibility is the job — not a virtue, a working requirement. The picture moves, the narration arrives late, and the cue you’re proudest of gets dropped at the mix because the scene doesn’t want it. A composer who can only work one way runs out of road early.
The score isn’t decided at the piano. It’s decided along the whole chain — and mostly by people who aren’t you.