Director-Composer relationship seminar

[bralston]

I have been asked to take part in a wonderful 2-part teleconference /online seminar with Bob Degus - Director & Producer the evenings of Tues June 24th and Tuesday July 1st. Bob was an executive and producer at New Line Cinema for many years overseeing Austin Powers and Pleasantville. He is also an active AMPAS member on the board of his branch. Bob and I have also worked together on many projects he has directed and produced. He is conducting a seminar series as the "Hollywood Film Coach" and this is the first…"Orchestrating The Composer - The Director-Producer Relationship. Info on the course is at the link below and a PDF of the topics covered you can download and check out. The target audience for this seminar is composers getting into the industry BUT…he has asked me to participate in a second more "advanced" seminar down the road where the target audience is directors and producers wanting to know more about working with a composer. Bob has MANY great stories from his years in the industry that are so educational to learn from.

There is a $99 cost…but he guarantees you will get out of it many things of value and be happy or he will give your money back. THAT is huge….you have nothing to lose.

Please pass along if you would be so kind to help me get the word out to any folks you may think may want to take this course. Bob is a wealth of information that any young composer out there normally does not have access to. I am humbled by his invitation to me to join him in this conversation.

http://thehollywoodfilmcoach.com/blog/o ... ationship/

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Thanks for that Brian. Surprised you haven't seen any responses here. It might be that the $99 fee seems a bit high in the current economic environment. It does seem like a worthwhile investment, especially if the discussion can help folks in navigating the whole manager, agent knot. I know I've been unable to untangle that one after 40 years of working professionally as a full time composer. Never used a manager or agent once. I did hire a lawyer to negotiate a critical agreement 20+ years ago and that made a big difference, but I suppose my work is so highly focused and diverse (and somewhat under the feature film radar) that the managers and agents aren't all that interested and frankly, I'm fine with that. Still, it's valuable stuff to know.

I assume you guys have posted on Facebook and Craig's list?

[bralston]

Hey Michael...I hear you. As was explained to me about how the $99 fee he is charging for his seminars came to be...he equates it to what will be approx a 4+ hour seminar. 2 sessions of roughly 2 hours each. (could be more with questions answered at end)...and that puts the time at roughly $25 an hour for the class. Sessions are also recorded and everyone will get an mp3 of the discussion/teleconference call. Combined with the money back guarantee he is offering if someone truly feels they did not get anything of value out of the seminar...he feels it is a competitive rate with other similar opportunities out there.

[dewdman42]

IMHO this seminar should be mandatory for any young composer hoping to work in the industry at any level. I was involved in a small animated film project once, student film, nothing major but some potential with Disney sniffing at it. Anyway there was another lead composer also involved and he butted heads emotionally with the film producer over artistic differences, specifically the producer didn't like our campy sounding example tracks. This was back in the day when only big pros could afford 5 computers running gigastudio. The director also provided very little information about what he wanted.

The score we eventually produced for them and recorded with 50-80 piece orchestra was fabulous and received many compliments from various people but the producer would not even listen to it at the end, her mind was made up ahead of time to reject it, and she did. Few years later I heard the new score and it was produced well but awful film scoring and not nearly as beautiful as ours was. It was loud and in your face and IMHO ruined the beauty of that particular film.

Still I think we could have interacted with her in a better way to give her some of what she was hoping for and still retain some of the vision we felt was there. The argument those two people had over a resolvable issue was really the only reason the project turned out failure.

In this business, it's very subjective and there are a lot of warm and fuzzy emotions as well as egos at play all over the place, including the composer. Worse yet, as composers we are ultimately subservient to the director and producer, even when thy are obviously a bit musically clueless. How to navigate and negotiate through that space is truly an art form and anyone that is at all serious about working with serious directors and producers should lap up every piece of wisdom they can get!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Shooshie]

Still I think we could have interacted with her in a better way to give her some of what she was hoping for and still retain some of the vision we felt was there. The argument those two people had over a resolvable issue was really the only reason the project turned out failure.

There are two kinds of collaborations: good ones and bad ones. I define bad ones as those in which one person tries to exert their will over all aspects of the collaboration. In other words, it isn't a collaboration at all, and becomes a employer/employee relationship. Sometimes the dominating will belongs to a genius, and it all ends up working. Most of the time, however, it's just about ego, and those just don't work.

The sad thing about bad collaborations is the wasted talent. You assemble talented people together to do what they do best, then you exert your will over them and prevent them from using their talent at all. Then what do you do? You blame them for being lousy at whatever they do, when in fact they only did what you told them to.

As a producer, it's difficult to learn to trust the talented people you assemble, but when you do, the result is almost always an order of magnitude better than you could have imagined. Sure, it's not what you envisioned, exactly, but it's... BETTER!

I've enjoyed reading about Phillip Glass's operas, because the early ones, at least, were great examples of collaboration. In the end, it's the music that you remember most about an opera, so it seems like those were the work of Glass alone, but in fact he was engaged in a wonderful collaborative effort with a playwright, set designer, lighting designer, and performers. For example, in Einstein On the Beach, there was no libretto for "Spaceship," a powerful piece that seemed to move faster than human speech allowed. While they were waiting for the libretto, they learned it by singing numbers as placeholders for future words: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4-5, etc. Gradually it became apparent that those numbers WERE the libretto. They worked with the subject and the music, and acted as a pivot point, artistically. That could only happen with collaboration.

Collaboration happens with communication, lots of it, among equals. Respect is key. The initial vision is inevitably altered as better paths become apparent, and those paths only become apparent through the back & forth dialog among equals. If someone has a clear vision and says "it's gotta be this way," then he or she deserves to have the others try it. But if the consensus is that it's not working, that person has to be willing to alter the vision, give up pet ideas, and let other talents do what they do best.

Collaboration is, in essence, a shared ego. In the end, the success or failure of a work comes from everyone. In reality it rarely happens that way, but when it does, success is almost always more likely; it's like crowdsourcing. The wisdom of combined minds greatly surpasses the limited vision of individuals. That was hard for me to accept, because I was one of those people with a strong ego and a powerful belief that "my way will succeed." Looking back over my life's work, limited though it is, I see that my solo work thrived on that mind-set, but my collaborations are always the weakest at the exact points where I threw a tantrum and demanded my way. We learn our talents alone, in solo, but applying them to a collaboration requires more learning — learning to share. Pull down the ego a bit. Confidence is good. Knowing that whatever you do, you can do well, is key to being a professional. But you've got to be able to let others in and work with their visions, too.

And the final result? It's usually stronger than any individual could have pulled off. As a member of that shared ego, you get to look at it and say "I did that... together with others. We did that."

Shooshie

[bralston]

Thank you guys for your thoughts. Yes...the composer-director-producer relationship is a unique one. As bob likes to say...as a producer/director...at the end of the day if there is an issue with a department, he can usually in a worse case scenario step in and do it himself. He has edited. He has cut sound. He has built sets. He has operated the camera. He knows how to wheel and deal and solve problems on the producer side, the budget side, etc...etc...but when it comes to music. He would have absolutely no clue how to write what the film needs. It makes the composer hire for him (and most directors/producers) a very scary hire.

Bob has a lot of stories from his long career. One of the things we will talk about on the list of things is when we first started working together. How he hired me. What he felt I did right way back then. And go through that experience of how I was able to manage Bob's expectations...and how he was able to guide and lead me to what he was wanting without knowing the language of music to describe to me what he wanted. It was a nervous situation for me too as I was fresh out of USC's film scoring program at the time. And the last composer Bob had worked with at that point was Randy Newman on Pleasantville. So...I knew he was use to the best of the best. It was nerve racking knowing that.

These kind of issues are why directors typically go back to using the same composer over and over. Once they find someone they trust...they tend to stick with it. It is also one reason why it is so hard to "break in". Today's established directors already have their composers for the reason mentioned above. And starting over with a new guy when the last project worked is just too risky. So...we will also explore some key things guys wanting to find work should know.

We are also going to do this seminar again in a couple months down the road with a different audience focus. Instead of focused on the composer side for that one...we will focus on directors and producers wanting to know more about use mysterious composer types. How to hire us, how to audition us, What to say, how to tell us you don't like something, temp love, etc...etc..

[bralston]

Just a few days away from this tele-seminar if anyone of our Motunation forum friends would like to take part. The seminar is a tele-conference with an online chat room component. So it is from the comfort of your own home or office...or wherever. Once signed up...participants will be given a phone number and conference ID# to enter on the phone (I believe Skype would work too) and also online logon instructions to an interactive chat room that will be live during the call for live interaction with us and with other participants.

When the seminar discussion is over...it will be audio recorded and everyone will get a download link to download the discussion that was had on both Tuesdays for future reference or so you can listen again and use for study if you want to. It also means if for some reasons you can not make one of the days "live" for unforeseen circumstances...you would still get the download recording of the calls to reference and listen to later as well.


See above for link and info.