Arts & Entertainment, Music
Scoring to Picture
Lesson time 09:49 min
Hans discusses how to score to different types of scenes, as well as recognizing when a scene doesn't need a score.
Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars
Topics include: Story • Scoring to the Edit
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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First of all, you go and look at the whole-- what is the whole movie? What are we trying to say here? What and where is the style that seems appropriate to tell this story? And what are the instruments that are appropriate to tell the story? OK, now we got this big arc. OK, now we're starting to move in. Is there something between act one, two, and three? Is this something we want to do different in act three. I mean I have this habit of setting up all these themes that you think are going to pay off in act three. And then I always think that's the moment that triggers act three, but when the thing happens that, Gladiator, Commodus finds out that his sister has been betraying him. So rather than going and now all the themes are going to pay off nicely, I just go and whack in something, a completely new theme? Because it's like all bets are off. Everything has shifted. The relationship between the characters have shifted. So I just go out of nearly nowhere, unleash something completely or-- completely new and completely fresh. But as you start, your start-- and you start going down, you go into the scene, into the dialogue, into the color that you want to use. Because here's the thing, if you suddenly stop forward momentum because there's a dialogue scene, how does it affect the rhythm of the whole movie if you're doing this. It's like being a bad driver who's forever, like, on the gas and then coming off the gas. I'm sure you've driven with people like this. You want to smack them. So don't be that driver. Figure out how to keep the forward momentum going. Making a movie as a complicated human exercise. Because basically what you're dealing with is you're dealing with only insecure people at their most insecure. Everybody's worried that what they're doing isn't the greatest thing in the world. And quite honestly, it never is. Otherwise we wouldn't need to make another movie if the perfect had already been made. So in this environment of total insecurity, sometimes it's really hard to say you know something we don't need music here. This scene is perfectly fine. The dialogue is sparkling. Because the writer is going to think, well, if I could have only had another seven years, I could have written this line better. The director is thinking, if I had had a better actor, it could have been delivered better. And the actor, of course, is thinking if I had had a decent director, I could have done a better performance. And then and everybody is blaming the camera man and the sound recordist, because it's too dark. And because they're feeling insecure about the scene, they're turning to the last man standing that's the composer, and they're going this scene needs a bit of help. Can you go and put some music underneath it to make it at least entertaining or something or the other? Or we need more tension, or we di...
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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