51 Marketing Ideas for Film Music Composers
Attention spans are short and very demanding. If you want to make your art into a business, you have to brand yourself and then market your art. No getting away from it.
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Personality Branding
The month of June has been one of reflection, for me, on the first half of the year, consolidation, evaluation, and looking forward to what the rest of the year will hold. It’s the calm between storms, if you will. One of the things I’ve been mulling over and considering is business development and branding. After all, my freelance work is a business, and it deserves the same care and attention as any business to grow and become more profitable.
Through this process, I’ve become fascinated with the ‘Myers-Briggs’ test. There are loads of different kinds of personality tests out there, but this is the one I’ve found the most useful and accurate for how I approach life and, more importantly, the business of scoring picture.
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Being Professional
A pro is someone who gets paid for what they do, pure and simple. Compare this with the opposite, the definition of an amateur, who does the same thing only for the love of it (i.e. or free). As soon as you get paid, you can legitimately call yourself a professional. A ‘Pro’. But, ultimately, only by being professional can you get to this point and stay there. A roundup of the qualities of the Pro Film Music Composer (by no means exhaustive!) follows…
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Acknowledge Your Success
I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly important it is to acknowledge your success in creating, to completion and delivery, a musical score. This music that you have produced is an integral part of the film, show, game or whatever project it is. It could not exist in its current form without your efforts. For the sake of your growth as a composer, sound designer, or other post-production professionals, you must underline the importance to your own psyche that this is a moment to be emphasized and cherished, that it is something desirable – and so to be repeated.
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Staying in Sync
This has been a fascinating month of articles on the ins, outs, technicalities, principles and importance of music spotting. It’s fair to say that the spotting session is an essential part of the music composition process, without which it is virtually impossible to stay in line – in sync – with the director’s vision for [...]
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Pitching for Gigs
Pitching for composing jobs is a necessary part of the business. By finding a niche and hanging out your wares, you’ll effectively reduce your competition from other composers, and by being an excellent chap to work with you’ll be inundated (!) with repeat business. But there will be times when you just gotta knuckle down [...]
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Ten Tips for Getting into the Composing Game
There is no magic bullet to getting a foot into this industry. Not unless you consider hard work, lots of rejection, or a healthy bent toward self-determination a “magic bullet”. Is there an easy way in? The answer, as with most things in life, is “no”. Most things that are worth doing don’t come easy. However, there are many tried and true methods as well as some proven principles that most of us here at SCO can safely say we’ve built our working careers on. While there would never been enough room to list them all, here are ten things that I’ve learned about getting a foothold and gaining some traction as a composer for film and television.
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Putting Your Gear to Work
I am not the most tech-minded of people. I thought Logic 9 was 64-bit until it was pointed out to me on Twitter that it wasn’t. I didn’t care though. It still runs lovely and fast. And on Snow Leopard too, which is a shock because I thought I was being a little risky upgrading [...]
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: How to Get Your Mojo Back
Ever have those days where you just don’t feel like it? And no matter how much you stare at that blank sequencer page, the notes just aren’t forthcoming? And you wonder if you’ll ever get that li’l spark of inspiration back.. How do you get your compositional, creative, musical mojo back if it’s gone on [...]
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: First-Time Collaboration
It’s a no-brainer that it’s easier to collaborate with previous clients than it is with new ones. • Communication flows freer and easier. • Trust is already developed. • Familiarity enables shortcuts in explaining ideas. • Practicalities such as file transfer and online collaboration tools have already been explored. Each party just knows from experience [...]
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Quality of Life
In a recent Scorecast article I wrote that I’ve never turned composing work down that I honestly believe I have the time and the skills to work on. That was about 2 months ago, right in the middle of practicing what I preached and jumping in the deep end with my organizational (=juggling) skills. I [...]
Read More →Heather Fenoughty: Credits, Royalties, and Why We Should All Go Live In Europe
As much as I love and live for television drama, I’ve yet to actually compose for a single episode, and though deep down that’s really what I’d love to do, part of me wonders if extreme physical and mental investment required just to do the job, never mind to the job well, is really that [...]
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