Music, Arts & Entertainment
Audience Feedback
Lesson time 11:37 min
The true test - learn how Hans approaches showing a score to an audience and how he determines if it's working or not.
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Topics include: Audience Testing • Executives & Studio Feedback
Teaches Film Scoring
From collaborating to scoring, Hans Zimmer teaches you how to tell a story with music in 31 exclusive video lessons.
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The first and selfish truth is I write for myself. Because the seconds of my life are ticking by, and I want to have a good life. And I want to write music that I like or that I'm interested in. But-- and this goes back 40-odd years, when I was in a band and I was touring in the '80s in England. And times were tough. Margaret Thatcher was in power. And if you went outside London, you went into the working class. You went up into the north, and you saw people working hard and trying to make ends meet. And so weirdly, every night playing in these pubs, you knew you were creating an escape for people. And so somehow over the years, in my mind, I have this fictitious character. She's called Doris. She lives in Bradford. She's of a certain age. She's got two boys, doesn't have a husband. She works really hard every week. Those boys are impossible, by the way. I mean, they're a real pain. She works really hard to try to make ends meet. And at the weekend, she's got a choice. She can either watch the television, or she can go to the cinema. And she plunks down her hard-earned money. And it really is hard-earned money. And life is tough. And she wants to have an experience. Just for two hours, she wants to have an experience that she wouldn't have in her normal life. And I am part of the responsibility of giving her that experience and not short-changing her on her hard-earned money. So yeah, most of it's written for Doris, who doesn't really exist, but completely and utterly exists. I like to do a temp dub. And I like to preview the movie. I like to put the music in front of an audience. And it's got to be a sizable audience. Because if it's just 15 of your best friends, you're never going to learn anything. They're just coming for the free drinks. But if you have 600 people in a room, you know pretty quickly if you overstepped the mark. Gladiator is a good example where when we started out and I had Lisa Gerrard, and her voice, I mean, the studio really didn't like the idea of the voice, just thought, what is a female voice doing in a gladiator movie? And Ridley and I had a very specific point of view about it. So we would literally go-- and we had many screenings where we would test, see-- because the audience really liked it. An audience is-- they just feel things differently. They're there for an experience. I noticed it, of course, most in Inception, that idea of shared dreaming that you get in a cinema. So we would preview it just to see how far we could push it. And there came a point, as well where even I went, hang on a second, OK? We've got to go and pull back a bit. You feel them getting a bit restless. It's not like you just sit there amongst them and-- you know, you've broken some sort of agreement you had with them to stay within the reality of whatever world you cre...
About the Instructor
Hans Zimmer didn’t see a film until he was 12 years old. Since then, he’s scored over 150 films, including Inception, The Lion King, and The Dark Knight. In his MasterClass, the self-taught Academy Award-winner teaches how he creates sounds from nothing, composes compelling character themes, and scores a movie before ever seeing it. By the end, you’ll have everything you need to start film scoring.
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Hans Zimmer
From collaborating to scoring, Hans Zimmer teaches you how to tell a story with music in 31 exclusive video lessons.
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