Scoring "Behind Closed Doors"

Throughout the last two years I have been arranging a small collection of possible theme ideas of which I might draw from for the composing of the score for Behind Closed Doors. Having completed the sound editing on the film just over a month ago and having put together a trailer in between then and now, I am finally entering the last phase of completing this picture: Composing the score.

This is in many ways yet another first for me, and therefore an opportunity to learn and gain new experience. The only previous composing I have done for a film was for a silent film project in film school known as The Race.

There are a couple of primary differences between that project and this one when it comes to putting together the music. For The Race, being a silent film meant that I didn't have to think about leaving room for the rest of the soundtrack and dialogue. Secondly, I am finding the process by which I approach hitting dramatic cues to be quite different. The Race was fairly straight forward trying to time it out. The cues in Behind Closed Doors are a lot more specific, there are more of them, and they involve a greater emotional stretch.

The instrumentation in The Race worked nicely for that project I thought. It was bare bones and generally simple, but it still fit nicely. One of my goals with the score for Behind Closed Doors is to make it a little more full. I have a wide variety of orchestral instruments at my disposal (synthetic/sampled ones), and I want to try and make it sound like a large orchestra. One of my greatest challenges in doing this I think will be in trying to keep it from sounding too synthetic. I think most people have had the unfortunate encounter with some bad TV movie which obviously had a low budget and wound up being recorded with some cheap synthetic sounds. The results are abysmal, and distractingly bad. It actually takes away from the storytelling most of the time in my opinion if it isn't done well. A low-fi score can actually be pretty effective sometimes when done right. I think of portions of the score that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did for Gone Girl. Amazing work! Although it suited that movie quite well, I don't think it would work so well for my movie... Nor do I think I could do half as good of a job. Anyway, I'm going to give this a shot, paying extra caution to not have it sound too cheesy in the final product.