Nan Avant: Being a Pro at All Times

Professionalism should be that standard by which we work at all times, no matter the type of project, the size of the budget, or the people for whom we are working. What you do at every step, how you conduct your business and professional life, will determine your career.

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…

The Professional Image

There’s a whole category of cliché that seems, at first glance, to revel in shallowness. “Fake it till you make it,” “image is everything,” “style over substance” and a bunch of others, all trumpeting the virtue of looking the part… to the detriment, one supposes, of actually being the part.

Our career, though, hinges on perception. In fact, film music could be said to be all about manipulating the perception of an audience (through music). So maybe there’s an argument to be made that these clichés, empty and soulless as they may seem, actually have some value for us in our day-to-day professional lives. More on image, and why it is actually important, after the jump.

Lydia Ashton: Inspiration

You need to be able to write no matter how you feel. A professional composer cannot rely on inspiration.

Going Pro

My goal in starting this website and podcast has always been to make our professional film music community “smaller” as we naturally grow “larger”. Over the past year, our website has undergone many alterations and we’ve experimented with various ways to communicate and interact as a community. Some of these methods have worked and some of them have needed further tweaking, but we’ve always strived to make SCO the very best experience it can be. To commemorate our anniversary, we will be launching even more new features at SCOREcastOnline.com in the coming weeks that will make the site even more robust as we seek to better serve this community. One of the things that I…