When you're scoring of film and you've decided what themes you need to write,
whether they be attributed to characters or objects or ideas,
sometimes inspiration flows and you get ideas freely.
In which case, you should just go for it and write those ideas.
Other times though, inspiration might not come right away.
So one trick I've found useful is if I look at this things that I'm going
to write themes for and brainstorm attributes of them.
So for example, if I'm scoring a movie with themes for characters,
I will look at those characters and just basically make
a list of adjectives for those characters,
and then I'll think about, "Okay,
what musical gestures may evoke those adjectives."
So an example is from a film that I scored,
an animated film where there was a little squirrel.
This was a quirky little character,
a little bit neurotic.
But he was a good guy,
and he actually ended up being the hero of the story.
So the squirrel is little.
So I decided I would write music fairly high,
melodically above middle C to evoke his smallness.
His energy was fairly high.
So my rhythmic content was fairly high energy,
and also given his quirkiness,
I decided to write syncopated rhythms.
Then also for his quirkiness,
I looked for a scale that would evoke this and I found that
the scale Lydian flat 7 is a scale that often can create a sort of quirkiness.
So that's this scale here,
it's not the only choice that a person could make for a quirky sound.
But that's what I chose for him.
So I started with accompaniment material that was like this.
So these sounds I felt evoked the quirkiness I
wanted through the intervallic material I found in the scale.
Then as I looked at the question of melody,
again I used the syncopated rhythm and I
accentuated what makes Lydian flat 7 sound the way it does.
So we have.
So together we got.
So contrasting the quirky squirrel is a character from
another animated work where there was a character
that was basically a large tree character.
So this was a speaking tree that was
a timeless character that had seen the ages and had wisdom and a little bit of sadness.
So what I started with was to say,
"Okay, this is a deeply rooted character,
literally rooted and figuratively rooted."
So I started with this low triad voicing.
I felt like that was really rooted in the ground,
this open triad that creates a feeling of depth.
Then given the wisdom and sadness of the character,
I felt that the mode of Mixolydian with
its five minor chord helps evoke
both wisdom and introspection and maybe a little bit of sadness.
So just that little chord progression helped me create the feelings of rootedness
and calmness and introspection mixed with a little bit of sadness.
So then melodically, I just moved with calmness through these,
and that was really all I needed for that wise old tree.
So you can see, by brainstorming adjectives and then searching for musical equivalences,
you can end up with lots of different results
that will hopefully work for the things you're trying to write.