PMC:06 Formative 2

Unrelated, but something I cannot imagine caring less about.

Assignment Score

Pass

Tutor Notes

Matteo Pagamici's Notes:

Hi Andrew,

The music is good, but it often feels disconnected from the picture. It runs in the background but is not always related the story.
You establish a rather dark and tense mood, but as soon as the characters start speaking, it becomes more comedy-like. While the first few seconds to set up the plot, afterwards there is nothing funny happening, making it feel forced. It should be light-hearted, but only comedic in the moments when there is actually something funny happening on-screen. Also, the music interferes with the character’s voices, making them harder to understand. This part either needs no music at all, or very subtle accents to emphasise certain moments, such as the line “this great symbol of power”. Right now the energy of the music is very constant, which means that all the dialogue lines are perceived as equal. Instead, try to use the music to create a hierarchy and point out to the audience what is really important. This is a kids’ show so everything needs to be ultra-obvious and unambiguous. There are some moments where you do this (e.g. “have to be arranged just right”), but it is too subtle.

TC01:46 - This is a major plot point. The music can be huge, keeping in mind that the storm and thunder sound design will also be rather loud. It should start when he turns off the light. Something big and terrible is happening, use the music to tell that this is not good.

The part at TC02:28 is really good. It feels light-hearted, but at the same time it still creates tension and gradually becomes darker. When the sceptre starts glowing we definitely need more intensity. The audience needs to feel the surprise.

When the pharaoh wakes up it gets tricky because this moment completes the exposition of the full episode, but at the same time there is a lot of dialogue. You chose an excellent moment to end the cue.

Overall you have some excellent ideas and material, but it needs to be placed more precisely. The music is rarely extremely big or extremely quiet, more dynamics and more contrast will help emphasising the most important moments. I suggest to spend enough time to analyse the video material more thoroughly. You need to know the intensity progression of each scene before you start scoring, define the necessary moods and find out what the most important moments are.

You do not need to use leitmotifs, but sometimes they make scoring easier as you can create a leitmotif-map before you even start writing music. After that, instead of writing to picture, you just create the needed motifs with different versions (light-hearted, tense, dark etc.) and place them. Then you fill the gaps. There is some of that in your score already, e.g. with the sceptre, it just is not clear enough because there are so many other things going on.

Matteo



Research: GOOD
Creative: FAIR
Technical: GOOD
Practical: FAIR

Matteo Pagamici's Summary:

The material is good, but it could be placed more efficiently to support the story and make the images more interesting. The music needs more dynamics and contrast.