By Cathleen Finlay
My brother, Charlie Finlay, has less than a week until deadline. A DVD just arrived by courier and now he’s under pressure to compose the music for the latest short film project he’s been hired to work on.
The clips are bare with only dialogue and a separate track with temporary music. It’s up to him to create the musical landscape in just six days that will make the scenes come alive.
It can seem sometimes that the people who write music for film and television are in the business of making magic. I’ve always watched my brother’s ability to take a silent clip and come up with many versions, each drawing out different nuances with fascination. But writing music for the screen is not as simple and whimsical as it may seem.
In recent years, there have been big changes in the industry. Increasingly cheaper software has meant that anyone living in their parents’ basement with a MacBook and Logic can call themselves professional musical screen composers. The ever-growing occurrence of undercutting has caused individual profits to continue to slide. Now, more than ever, composers need to nurture a diverse set of skills in a variety of areas while also committing a lot of time and energy to the complex craft of music composition for the screen.
Charlie Finlay - All photos by Cathleen Finlay
“I’m in it for the long haul,” Charlie says, despite all this. “Good musicians and composers will find a way to make a living creating music. I just love doing it.”
Music composition for the screen is a world governed by tight deadlines and low budgets, where beloved work is often left on the cutting room floor. And yet, the number of composers continues to swell. People are finding creative ways to make a living in the industry and support offered by organizations like the Screen Composers Guild of Canada (SCGC) provide composers with education and community.
But more than anything, composers continue to do it because they love it too much not to.
When Charlie composes, it isn’t as simple as dreaming up melodies according to his tastes. “Doing music for film and television is different because it’s for a specific purpose and it’s for something…that already exists,” he says. “Music is a slave to the project that you’re working on.”
Although the composer and the director work in tandem to figure out musical themes, it’s not always easy to communicate these ideas. “It’s best to work with the director and talk in emotional terms, not in musical terms,” Charlie explains. “Because if the director hasn’t gone to school for music, they may have different ideas about what musical things mean.”
Toronto film director Chris Ross agrees: “If you don’t have a common language then they’re trying to understand where I’m coming from and I’m trying to communicate as much as I can with the limited tools that I have.”
It’s up to the composer to translate the emotional core of a scene into musical notation. “I’ve always been quite amazed by how adaptable composers are,” Ross says. “You collaborate and yet they go off and do their thing. It’s almost like a separate art form on top of the film.”
Although the job sounds difficult, changes in the industry over the last several years have made it even harder. Improved software has allowed composers to work with better quality instrumentation, minimizing the need for live musicians while still producing great sounding clips. While instruments on computers are sounding more realistic, the cost of gear and software is going down.
The problem is, the less expensive the tools, the more saturated the business becomes.
“The accessibility through technology really makes it very easy for a lot of people,” SCGC President Marvin Dolgay says. “The challenge is basically that there’s tons of people doing it. How do you make a full time career out of it?”
Composers don’t just have to compete with many other people for jobs, they also have to combat undercutting. Because new composers are trying to build their reel with clips illustrating their work, some will offer their services for free. Although it seems harmless, this devalues the work of everyone else in the business.
Toronto composer and guitarist Brian Seligman says young composers new on the scene usually aren’t aware of the damage they’re doing and undercut unknowingly. “What happens is a lot of people are just making a lot of music from their computer and they feel like ‘Oh it didn’t cost me anything!’” Seligman says.
Part of the problem of undercutting is how it affects attitudes towards the payment of musicians, Seligman says. “Plumbers get paid 60 bucks an hour for their work and nobody even questions it,” he says, “but musicians get paid virtually nothing all the time and nobody questions that. For some reason it’s completely okay to ask a band to play at a venue for free but you would never ask a plumber to come fix your sink for free.”
To compound the problem of saturation and undercutting, most musicians never learned money management skills, Seligman says, which makes negotiating budgets difficult.
“You go to school for music and they said, ‘this is an arts school where the focus of your degree is to learn how to perform that art.’ So making a living off it really wasn’t their concern for us,” he says.
Music composers operate in a crowded industry where their work is often devalued and there is little tangible instruction on how to make a living in the workforce. When the hourly wage is calculated, Charlie says it often works out to be $10 per hour. “The numbers are horrifying,” Seligman says. “The number of composers who are out there who actually make a living off of what they do – it’s virtually non-existent.”
[pullquote]“Music is the most amazing
part of filmmaking…it
influences the entire thing
so deeply and intrinsically.”
- Chris Ross, director[/pullquote]
So how are composers getting by if the numbers are so horrifying? Marvin Dolgay says just like in any other career, “really good people will always do well.” He stresses that people need to put in the time and effort nurturing relationships and learning the complicated art. Composers need to “really dedicate themselves to that medium, get relationships with editors, directors, producers, et cetera, and really continue on that path dedicating yourself and doing it as a career rather than as a hobby.”
But it isn’t as simple as that. “On one hand, I know I’m saying if you want to be successful screen composing you need to dedicate yourself,” Dolgay says, “but on the other hand that’s also a bit of suicide.” He says composers have to do whatever work they can get to make it, including advertising, web-based work or production.
It’s a delicate balance between composing and developing new skills. Composers survive when they’re able to find a variety of avenues for income. “For me it was a matter of work opportunities and being more well-rounded in terms of being multi-media, technical, and creative,” Toronto composer Kevin Fallis says. “If someone wants to come to me with a project that needs music composition, sound design, and editing, I’ll be able to do all those things.”
Working from small studios with only a computer for a companion, many composers feel alone. The SCGC helps to bring musicians together through social events and educational seminars. “We have events with each other, just to become part of a community so that people aren’t in isolated studios,” Dolgay says. The events remove the isolation, but also allow musicians to network. “You become friends with these people and you pass around gigs so if somebody gets a gig and it doesn’t work for their timeline then they’ll send it your way and vice versa,” Seligman says.
Talking with other composers about industry rates is helpful for composers as well: “We don’t always talk shop, but when we do, a lot of the conversations are based on budget,” Seligman says. “How to work a budget out, how to speak with directors about budget and things to keep in mind. Because musicians, for whatever reason, have a tendency to undercut themselves as far as budget and money.”
Dolgay made it clear that the guild does not set rates, but it does educate musicians about pay expectations. “We can give composers a range…So if they’re working under that, they can make a value judgment themselves and try to promote the idea that if they’re taking a job, it’s either to create a relationship, create a credit, create a good musical experience, create a pay cheque. If there’s two or three of those that are good, they should take the job. But the idea is that you should know what the job is.”
He also insists composers don’t need to take whatever they can get. “There’s tons of ways to negotiate,” he says. “There’s rights, territories, exclusivity. There are things, other than dollars that are negotiable.”
The community created by the guild is unique to Canada, Dolgay says. In the U.S. many screen composers are extremely competitive, often creating a less-than-friendly work environment for musicians. “We’re Canadian,” Dolgay says. “I think our guild has really, through the years, nurtured that community spirit and our concept that the rising tide raises all ships. What’s good for one guy is good for everybody. We want everyone to succeed here. If people are saying that you can get a good job done in Canada, that benefits all of us.”
As for the future of the industry, Dolgay is optimistic. He sees that other mediums have yet to figure out how they will fit into a highly advancing technological future. Television “still hasn’t sorted out the Internet so how can we?” he asks. “I think that’s the danger – that it’s all out there and there’s file sharing and it’s hard to track and stuff. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we as creators now have access directly to our consumer – be it a film, a pop tune, a cat playing piano, whatever it is. And that changes the dynamic of the opportunities.”
The music made by musicians like Seligman, Fallis, and my brother is an important part of the media that Canadians have been consuming with an appetite that has been growing all the more voracious.
“Music is the most amazing part of filmmaking,” Ross says. “I’m always so shocked by how much music changes a film, or how much influence it can have on the whole film…it influences the entire thing so deeply and intrinsically.”
Dolgay says rather than being the demise of the industry, this is a profound opportunity. “How it will be monetized is still being worked out,” he says. “The distribution network is wide open, the ability to touch our fans and our consumers is huge – tons of opportunity. We’re just trying to figure out how to make a living through that opportunity.”
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