How To Make A Living From Music For Picture

Writing music for picture seems like the ideal career. You get to work in your studio for a living, you can earn good money, and there's so much potential work: action films, travel and nature documentaries, romantic comedies, cartoons, low-budget sci-fi, even breakfast cereal ads. But how do you break into this lucrative world?

If you're ever going to make it in this game, you need a calling card, a way of impressing potential clients with your musical ability — you need a showreel. We explain what to do to create one...

The perfect project studio doesn't exist, as everyone has different working methods — and so it is with equipment for creating music for picture. However, there are some fundamental bits of gear you will need. We provide some guidance...

Success! You've been invited to pitch for a job. Surely that Hollywood career now beckons? Well, no... This is just a pitch — there are others competing for the job. We look at how to maximise your chances of winning the commission...

So, you've been commissioned to write the score for something. What should you do next? We provide some suggestions, with real-world scoring examples for you to download and try.

We look at the completed orchestrations for the film project introduced last month, and begin to consider the problem of what to do when a director demands revisions to your work...

What happens when the Director whose work you're scoring isn't satisfied, or demands changes due to events beyond your control? We find out, and also look at writing music for film trailers.

In music-for-picture work, there's never enough time to do what you'd ideally like to. We look at what it's like producing music under pressure.

Rather appropriately, we round off this series by looking at what you need to consider when composing music designed to play while the end credits roll...