Strings or no strings attached... Darren Fung
Industry Centre > Blogs > Strings or no strings attached... | Darren Fung
Posted by Darren Fung
on Thursday, August 07, 2008.
Categories: Writing, Cinematography
The last two or three weeks have been insane.
Insane in a good way, because busy usually means that the bank account is doing alright.
I've had the good fortune to work on a couple of huge advertising campaigns (I can't really talk about the show name or details on this blog) and doing a theme for a huge, major Canadian TV show (again, stuff that I can't really talk about).
It's interesting because in the last couple of months I've done more orchestral recording sessions than many composers do in a lifetime. Orchestral recording sessions cost money, and usually indie filmmakers don't have that sort of money. But people who do have lots of money are people in advertising or bigwigs at the network.
Two years ago, I scored my first feature film, Summerhood. We were fortunate enough to have a big enough budget to record with an orchestra in Prague. Same thing with Just Buried, which just recently had its theatrical premiere (you should go check it out!).
The budgets weren't huge, and I didn't make a whole lot of money on them, but it was great to be able to record a whole feature film with a real orchestra.
Now, enter in these two or three projects that I've had recently. This is neither here nor there but whenever you have big money attached to something it's amazing the strings that come attached with that money. Yes, you get to write for a big honkin' orchestra and you can afford to go into overtime without affecting your own bottom line, but you also have eight or nine people giving you direction in terms of how they envision the music sounding.
Again, it's neither here nor there, but it's been a bit of an awakening for me. I remember in one session the clients were discussing some changes to the music while the orchestra was waiting for 20 minutes.
With another project I was asked to come back to Toronto and re-record something. If you can imagine paying a musician roughly $100 an hour and multiplying that by however many musicians you have (one project was six musicians, the other was 25), it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you have to be careful when budgeting your time.
Welcome to the big league...
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Views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).
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The views expressed here are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Screen Institute - Canada (NSI).