A Rant About Deadlines

As mentioned in a previous post, I've had the opportunity to score a student film that I took a part in producing. We planned to submit it to our high school film festival, so we had to be on our game. Sadly, the deadlines messed us up from the start. We wrote the script with only about four hours of work put into it, then rushed into filming. Our original plan gave us three full days to film the full movie, then a week to edit and score. However, filming was pushed back because of weather, and so we had to fit in two days of filming into one day, which means that if you get a shot and aren't happy with it, too bad. When we had all the shots that we wanted, there were only six days until the submissions were due. It took four days to finalize a rough cut for me to score... leaving me two days to write a film score, record it, and mix it. And I had school on those days as well. Yeah. I hate deadlines.

This was my first project that I've worked on with such a tight schedule. Sometimes it takes me that long to get a melodic sketch of one song that I really fall in love with. The problem is that I couldn't write something then say "You know what, that could be a lot better". I didn't have time to make changes. I spotted the movie with the director at about 5:00p.m. on Wednesday, then had to hand him a finished .wav file at 7:00a.m. on Friday... This forced me to write whatever first came to mind then move on. I would have sections of score that were basically just whole notes. Here's a picture of a few seconds of the score:

Clearly VERY boring score...

I've been able to quickly discover how deadlines can ruin a score. I worked long hours on something that I wasn't proud of. I slaved away at a computer for about half of a 62 hour period, without sleeping, for nothing. The film wasn't even accepted into the film festival, I'm learning now. It leaves me to wonder, what if the music was better? What if I had another week to work on it? Would I have made a better score, then been accepted into the festival? If we had been accepted, would I have the chance to redo the music? I WILL NEVER KNOW!

But this leaves me to wonder, does this happen to pro film composers to? There have been a lot of questionable scores for really great movies before. Is it just because they didn't have enough time to do what they're good at just because of a freaking deadline!? This rant sounds really stupid, but my point still stands. Deadlines suck.

On the bright side, I've reached my goal. I managed to compose as much music as I decided to by the end of the school year. It ended up being terrible, but I still reached my goal either way. I'll just stop here.