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When you’re scoring a scene, chances are you’ll be watching that scene countless times as you compose to it.
Same goes for your score—you could spend hours on just a few seconds of music at a time.
That becomes a big problem. ❌
While you might spend a week on a few seconds of music, your score goes whizzing by the audience’s ears in just a few seconds.
This is why composers tend to overwrite.
When I began composing additional music for **Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight,** I’d mostly been scoring 3-5 minute animations.
Scoring a 20-minute episode was a new experience for me.
Robert Lydecker, one of the show’s lead composers, gave me a 2-minute action sequence that fell around the middle of the episode.
Eager to start, I jumped right in.
I spent the entire day scoring that sequence, building the fight’s climax to a grand finale before a triumphant final chord ringing through the orchestra.
Pleased with the finished piece, I decided to watch it in context with the full episode.
It was only then that I realized…
The fight sequence I’d scored was just the beginning of a much larger fight sequence that ran through the rest of the episode.
My music peaked before the story did.
Don’t make the same mistake I did.
Take the time to adequately spot a scene.
Be mindful of the context of that scene as it relates to the whole story.
If it’s just the beginning of the story, don’t use the full orchestra.
If it’s an action scene, decide how tense it should be before starting.
If you lose sight of the context while you’re working, take a break and re-assess.
Don’t get so caught up in the details of your score that you forget the big picture.