Give The People What They Want

Directors Want Credits

Composer Deane Ogden is in the middle of an illuminating series of blog posts called Essential Skills of a Modern Day Film Composer which, as the title suggests, has the goal of identifying and improving the skills needed for getting and keeping work as a film composer.

There are three parts so far, but I’m focusing on Part 2, What Directors Want From Their Composers. Built from an anonymous survey of a handful of directors, it offers some great insights into their mindsets and approaches to music in their films and touches on everything from what they look for in potential composers to the drawbacks of temp scoring.

Filled with direct quotes and pretty pie charts, it’s a great read, not just for film composers, but for anyone interested in the collaborative creative process.

Conan!

A high quality re-recording of Basil Poledouris’s complete Conan the Barbarian score? This is bound to get Crom’s attention.

Also, I hear he has a new show premiering next week on TBS. Should be interesting.

Basil Poledouris has never been happy with both the original performance and the recording in Rome. The composer has always been very disappointed that the Rome orchestra could not provide every desired instrument he wanted in the score. This is now corrected for this new complete recording featuring 96 musicians and a choir of 100 voices.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (2CD) (CD)

Michael Kamen Conducting Robin Hood

Scoringsessions.com has posted a video of the late Michael Kamen conducting a 1991 scoring session for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

I’ve always been a fan of Kamen and Robin Hood and Band of Brothers are two of my favorite scores, so it’s pretty cool to see this footage: