Composing for the big screen

“David’s taught a number of short courses in Composition for Screen for Birmingham Conservatoire, as well as workshops for students of Composition and Music Technology, all to great success. A number of students have gone on to gain professional work at a variety of levels using skills learned from David.”
Dr Simon Hall, Asst. Head Music Tech, Birmingham Conservatoire

Having given a number of lectures at the Conservatoire, I developed a course on Composing for Film and Visual Media, with students given the opportunity to record their music with professional musicians.

My involvement with the Birmingham Conservatoire goes back to 2008 and followed a conversation with Dr Simon Hall, the Conservatoire’s assistant head of music technology.

The Conservatoire wanted to move the focus of its teaching away from the purely theoretical approach to give students a realistic view of the music business from the point of view of a composer working in the real world.

An initial programme of lectures and workshops led on to the creation of a new film scoring course, (sponsored by Macprovideo and Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) which we have held twice now. This is a five-day event, with attendance by invitation only, that deals with all aspects of film scoring.

For the first course we teamed up with film director Dean Twaites  to allow the course attenders to compose the soundtrack after a programme of tuition. The score was recorded by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with students given the option of conducting their own score in real time to a backdrop of the film – a rare and valuable experience. Dean’s horror movie ‘Confinement’ went on to win a number of awards.

The second course was as big a success as the first although for this one we concentrated our attentions on the technical aspects of film scoring, the use of Sibelius and Logic software, and legal aspects of the business.