Deciding What Scenes to Score?

[ChemicalReaper]

Hi, John,

Thank you very much for taking out time to answer our questions!

One thing that I've noticed on film soundtracks is that there seems to be relatively little music compared to the length of the film. Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" (although he only worked with a music supervisor, not a composer), for example, has about 10 minutes of actual music, even though the film is over an hour and a half. "Gladiator," which is over two hours long, has a 45-50 minute soundtrack. And your soundtrack for Disney's "Bolt" is about 25 minutes long (not including the two songs and reprise, by Miley Cyrus and Jenny Lewis) even though the film is an hour and a half long.

My question is, how do you decide which scenes to score and which scenes to leave without music?

Thanks again for taking your time to do this Q&A.

- James

[John Powell]

A movie has music "spotted" into it by the general feeling of the film makers and the composer as to where it can help the film the most. This process is a mixture of discussions and the effect of the temp track allowing everyone to see what might be achieved if music is put in a scene or not. The cumulative effect of music across the whole movie, even if it isn't the right music, will be enlightening.

But don't confuse this with the amount of music on a soundtrack album. There are many other forces brought to bare as to why soundtracks are the way they are and most of them are fiscal.

As the composer, i'm there to help bring the right amount and type of music into the storytelling and no more. Sometimes this requires writing hours and hours of music and sometimes requires me to step aside and let songs do most of the heavy lifting.

[AlCapps]

Sometimes this requires writing hours and hours of music and sometimes requires me to step aside and let songs do most of the heavy lifting.

OUCH, that "hurts"

Al