ABSTRACT
The filmography of music composers is truly a bookshelf unto itself. An important lesson a music composer learns is that writing music for the screen is very different from writing music that is a total performance unto itself. When writing for the screen, the composer must understand that he or she is sharing the audio track with two other major concerns--spoken dialog and sound effects. During the picture editing process, temp music is pulled from audio CDs or other tape sources to be cut in along the cut picture, to relate a scene's intent or a mood set by music. Nagging incidents do occur when a music composer actually scores the picture in a deliberate attempt to torpedo the sound effects track, sometimes out of ego, other times out of ignorance or fear of collaboration. Collaboration between the music composer and the sound effects team truly improves the final effort.
