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Scoring Collide:
Using the Power of Sound Booth CS4 Scores

by Eric Henninger

As I'm sure you know, one of the biggest post production challenges as an independent/micro-budget filmmaker is finding music with which to score your film. Finding the right music is an interesting challenge, but finding music that you can use without paying royalties, which most of us can't afford, can present another challenge in and of itself.


There are a few ways to go about it: some require certain software and a elementary knowledge of music (such as Garage Band, Soundtrack Pro, Sony’s ACID), some require simply being able to access the internet (such as freeplaymusic.com), and some require that you're fortunate enough to have a friend or two that can compose original music. I have had the privilege of being able to use all three for different projects. All of these options allow you to put unique music in your film that will not put you out $20,000 or land you in court...neither of which are good things. The only downside to using full scores that are available to everyone is that you run the likelihood of having the same piece of music that someone else has used in their project. That doesn't present a legal issue, of course, but it is annoying (and removes the part about having “unique” music in your film). Putting loops together to create your own piece reduces those chances drastically, but the skill set required to do this is not very universal. (Not to sound like a music snob, but I’ve seen some micro-budget films from filmmakers who used loops who should never have been allowed to touch looping software. It can get really bad really, really quickly.) Of course, if you’re musically inclined, creating totally original music from scratch is, in my opinion, the best option. But, if musical inclination and the fundaments of score composition are not in your arsenal and you don’t have someone who can hook you up with these abilities, how do you get a unique score?


Well, as regular readers know, at MFM we’ve been exploring a number of score assistance programs, from industry innovator Smartsound with their SonicFire offerings to more recent developers Sony (with their PC-only Cinescore) and Adobe (with their cross-platform Soundbooth). I’ve been doing a lot of work with Adobe’s CS4: Production Premium suite recently and it seemed a great time to return to a past project I’ve had to backburner for awhile.

When I first started filmmaking, it was on Collide, a thirty minute drama I wrote about a man who loses his son to cancer and then must make his way out of the morass of guilt and shame he feels after the fact so that he doesn’t lose the rest of his life. As it was very important to me that I be able to star in the film, I co-directed the picture with MFM Editor, Jeremy Hanke, who was able to handle the onset direction while I focused on my character. After production wrapped, I focused on most of the post and making sure it lived up to the vision I had in my mind. As so often happens with first films, however, the production was fraught with technical problems and hurdles, and post-production spun out of control.


This led to me creating a cut of the film that I was extremely unsatisfied with before moving on to my next projects. While my future projects earned me a degree of acclaim and won some humbling awards from different festivals, they still did not remove my desire to go back and rework my initial film.

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