I believe you have to have a passion for film,
if you're in film scoring for the sake of the music,
I think you have the wrong mindset.
You have to be a filmmaker that writes music.
That, I believe is the right mindset.
My name is Kurt Oldman, I'm a composer for film and tv,
my current show is SuperMansion
which is a stop-motion show with Bryan Cranston.
I think as a film composer you need to be, a good interpreter.
You cannot expect people to communicate musically,
Directors very rarely do
and when they do, try to communicate musically,
they mean something else, you know they're not using the right language,
nor should they have to, their language is supposed to be emotion,
visual ideas, all sorts of things.
It's really your job to interpret that into music,
that's the main thing.
Well, I clearly got into the industry because of horror,
I mean I always was a horror super freak,
it's just something that fascinated me.
The film that actually got me into the industry was Hellraiser 2,
I just remember seeing this film, going holy s**t, I had no idea you could
actually do that for a horror film!
Yeah, that really got me started on horror.
I've done, too many horror flicks I think that one composer should have to do,
but again, it was very freeing, a lot of experimenting.
I ended up going into the drama direction for quite a bit,
again dramas, are very working on the underlining kind of emotion,
you know, not everything is that direct, you really want to
dig a little bit deeper.
Then once I discovered animation,
having been an animation fan for a long time,
I really worked hard of getting into that a little bit more as well.
I mean all these genres are equally as interesting to me,
I always try not to do one thing for too long,
you know, so you never really get comfortable.
The whole process starts as early as my agent giving me a call saying,
"This is a project that might be right for you, do you want to look at it?
or set up a meeting?" or what not.
That's really where the initial discussion starts about
the kind of music that you might be doing for this project.
You know if it's a horror film they might
have a temp music in there already, that is coming from other films.
Everything you get has temp music in it.
Once we decide that this is the project for us,
then we sit down and spot the film, analyse temp music a little bit,
if that works for them, if it doesn't work, figuring out what the tone
or what the direction could be for the film.
We would at the spotting session decide where music needs to go,
where music doesn't need to go,
what the music is supposed to do.
Unless you know, what the purpose is you really don't know where to go with it,
so you have to have a certain idea of storytelling,
characters, tone.
You know, maybe does a character need help here?
Do we want to portray something that we don't see on the screen?
Is there something way deeper?
Is there a conflict, that our character has that is not obvious?
It helps as a composer, to get an initial impression and then walk away
and not really focus on the details,
so you get a very broad kind of an impression of the project.
Once that direction is approved, you go and score to film,
so you really tackle one scene after another, not necessarily in sequence.
Most of the time I just choose the scenes that scare me the most,
you know to sort of, get all that out of the way.
From there you create mockups,
present that to the director, if you get a cue approved it would go to the orchestrator,
who then fills out the blanks.
The music gets prepared for the orchestra and that's what will be on the actual
stands of the musicians once you're done.
It's also all about workflow too you know,
I mean creating your mock-ups to the degree that we have to create those mock-ups,
you've technically gotta be on top of everything.
Your templates and samplers gonna be set up to the degree that
you know where everything is, otherwise you can't do it.
Workflow-wise my studio is set up with one main machine for my workstation
so, the digital workstation which is Cubase.
I have running three sampler machines,
the sampler machines basically take care of the orchestra,
one machine is all the woodwinds then we have one machine streaming all the brass samples,
all the strings and percussion that's where all the sounds are then being transferred into the main machine.
One video machine that is synchronised to the main machine that just plays back
the film you're working on or the tv episode
and there is one server,
that holds all the project files for the different machines,
that does all the backups that just has a whole bunch of project files on there.
I mean I have a lot of macro set up, hundreds of them which just take care of repetitive tasks,
like transposing things, like condensing things, moving things to a certain place.
Taking care of these kind of repetitive tasks, can really save you weeks and weeks.
I came across Audient when it came down to replacing my 5.1 controller.
I just wasn't happy with how it sounded, I mean it was noisy, it coloured the sound.
I remember being in a session with a mixing engineer somewhere in Santa Monica
and I wasn't aware of Audient at the time, and he mentioned the ASP510.
I ended up checking it out, I loved it.
Besides the fact that the connectivity, the ins and outs are incredible.
For me it was the sound, it just sounded so crystal clear,
I didn't even have to think about it after I heard it, it was a no-brainer.
The Nero, the same thing for me, I heard it,
it didn't colour the sound, it just sounded great!
I went through quite a few monitor controllers over the years,
Nero came along and "Ah finally",
you will get the complete picture of how it's supposed to sound.