shieroz – Page 15 – Shie Rozow – Composer, Music Editor

Quick Tip: Numbering Cues

There are several conventions when numbering cues for your project. The oldest was simply keeping a running tally of each cue i.e. M001, M002, M003 and so on. The M stands for Music, so this would indicate music cue 1, music cue 2, music cue 3 etc.

At some point a new convention became popular, starting with the reel or act number, then the letter M, then the cue number within that reel or act, for example 1m01, 1m02, 1m03, 2m01, 2m02, 2m03 etc. This system is still very popular and effective. It’s easy to see how many cues are in each reel or act using this system.

Finally, a variation on this system became popular, combining both of the above conventions. In this system the reel or act number is first, then M for music and then a continually escalating number for each cue like so: 1m01, 1m02, 1m03, 2m04, 2m05, 2m06 and so on.

In my entire career I haven’t seen the old serial system in use except when looking up old cue sheets for Bride of Frankenstein (1935) & The Wolf Man (1941). So I think it’s safe to say nobody uses it anymore.

I prefer the latter method for two main reasons. First, it makes it impossible to have 1m2 and 2m1, which can be easily confused, especially when it’s late and you’re tired and trying to beat a deadline, or if you’re dyslexic. Second, it’s not uncommon to re-balance reels after cue numbers have been assigned and using the latter system you can simply change 1m07 to 2m07 to indicate the cue that used to be at the end of reel 1 is now at the top of reel 2. It’s still cue 07, and always will be.

I also like using leading zeros when numbering cues (i.e. 1m01 not 1m1). This makes sure things are always sorted properly when looking at file names on my computer or using any database system I may be using to help manage my projects.

A few more conventions I like:

If a cue is added between cues, I will number it as the cue that precedes it and add a letter to the cue number. For example, if a cue is added between 2m04 & 2m05 I’ll call it 2m04A. If another is added between 2m04A & 2m05 I’ll call it 2m04B and so on. If a cue is added between 2m04A & 2m04B it can be 2m04AA or 2m04A2 – thankfully that’s an extremely rare occurrence.

If a composer choses to split up a cue into parts, I use the same convention. For example if 3m24 is split up into 3 distinct cues they will become 3m24A, 3m24B and 3m24C.

Finally, I like to have a quick visual in the cue number that lets me know if it is underscore for the composer to write, a needle-drop (source or song) or on-camera production (i.e. someone singing on camera). I don’t do anything for score cues. I add an “s” for needle-drop to indicate it is a song or source cue (i.e. 4m43s) and I add a “p” for production cues (i.e. 6m72p).

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or add a comment.

Jasmine Wins Grand Jury Prize at LAAPFF

May 1, 2015

Jasmine Crew

Jasmine, the dark psychological thriller by director Dax Phelan took the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Film at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. The film also won Special Jury Prizes for Best Sound Design (Lisa K Fowle), Best Cinematography (Guy Livneh), Best Editing (Chris Chan Lee) & Best Actor in a Drama (Jason Tobin).

Written and produced by Dax Phelan, Jasmine is Dax’s directorial debut. Shie scored the film (the soundtrack is available on iTunes, amazon.com & all major online retailers).

Jasmine tells the story of a once-successful Hong Kong businessman, Leonard To (Jason Tobin), who is still reeling from the tragedy of his wife’s murder the year before. Having lost his job, friends and all sense of order in hi life, Leonard becomes obsessed with a mysterious stranger he sees at his wife’s grave (Byron Mann), believing him to be responsible for her death. Phelan’s direction shies away from the tourist’s-eye-view of Hong Kong, capturing instead the atmosphere of isolation that lurks within the bustle and crowds.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Feature Film

Feature Film
US Release: May 01, 2015

Marvel Studios presents Avengers: Age of Ultron, the epic follow-up to the biggest Super Hero movie of all time. When tony Stark tries to jump-start a dormant peacekeeping program, things go awry and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, including Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye, are put to the ultimate test as the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. As the villainous Ultron emerges, it is up to the Avengers to stop him from enacting his terrible plans, and soon uneasy alliances and unexpected action pave the way for an epic and unique global adventure

Role: Music Editor

Composers: Brian Tyler & Danny Elfman
Director: Joss Whedon
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Paul Bettany, James Spader

Ride

Feature Film

Feature Film
US Release: May 1, 2015

A mother travels cross-country to California to be with her son after he decides to drop out of school and become a surfer.

Role: Temp Music Editor

Director: Helen Hunt
Cast: Helen Hunt, Brenton Thwaites, Luke Wilson, David Zayas

Official Selection San Francisco International Film Festival 2015

Official Selection Jeonju International Film Festival 2015

Balancing Your Career & Personal Life

The entertainment industry is very bipolar. One day you’re without a job, the next you’re working 7 days a week, 12-hour or longer days for weeks on end. And just as suddenly as it all began the project is done and it’s all over again. Sometimes, we’re lucky enough to know what’s coming next and have projects lined up one behind the next, but often that’s simply not the case. Even if it is, schedules change all the time making this a very unpredictable industry.

So how do you balance an erratic career schedule and a personal life? There’s no one right answer, but I’ll do my best to offer some advice based on my own experience.

On a daily basis, I try to be home every evening to eat dinner with my wife & kids and to tuck them in to bed. It’s not always possible, and on days that I have to work late in the studio or take a meeting I try to call at bedtime if I can. On days I work from home, I take a break to pick-up my son from school. It may not be much, but little things matter.

On a broader basis, when I work it’s often difficult to find much time to spend with my family and friends. But when I have a day off, or am between projects, I try to spend as much time as possible with my wife & kids, and getting together with friends. I also make sure I take some time for myself. It’s important to recharge.

Finally, my wife & I have had conversations about my career and she understands that there are times when I am slammed, but when I’m not, I do whatever I can to step up and help around the house, and be there for her and the kids – really be there. I rarely have a balanced day, or even week. But I try to balance the intensity of my work with being just as dedicated to “switching off” from work and being present on a personal level when I have time off.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or add a comment.

Quick Tip: Kontakt Quick-Load

Quick Tips

Over the years I’ve acquired quite a few sample libraries. I have a lot of libraries that are powered by Kontakt. Some come with built-in-libraries that you can load into Kontakt. Many don’t.

What I’ve found is that you really need to get to know all your libraries well and remember what you have and where in order to take advantage of them. And as your collection of libraries grows, that becomes harder and harder to keep track of.

Kontakt’s database is pretty good, but again limited to libraries that support it. However, Kontakt has a wonderful feature – the Quick-Load menu, which is completely customizable.

I’ve found it was well worth my time to spend a day or so building my custom Quick-Load menu system. Finding any sound from any library is a snap thanks to my well organized Quick-Load menus. Whenever I get a new sample library, I spend a few minutes adding its instruments & multis to my Quick-Load menu – those extra few minutes save me countless minutes later.

Here’s a screen-shot of my Quick-Load menu system. This works well for me. To keep things ordered the way I want them I use numbers in front of the folder names. I like to have things organized in score order with synths & other at the end. If you like it feel free to copy this structure and add your own instruments. Or make your own that suites your needs. Whatever you do, I think it’s wroth the effort and saves a lot of time when working. I never have to dig around for instruments, I know exactly where to go find them.

Kontakt 5 – Quick-Load

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or add a comment.

Quick Tip: Audio Demos

Quick Tips

When sending demos, consider these few quick tips to make sure your material is presented well:

1. Trim your audio files. Nobody likes a second or two of silence before the music begins when they hit play. Trim your audio so it plays immediately like every professional track you hear on every album you’ve ever owned. If it feels too abrupt, you can add a few milliseconds of silence, but don’t have long silences either before or after the music plays. And make sure when you trim the end of your audio files that yo do not accidentally crop the audio – make sure the endings sound nice and natural and ring out properly.

2. Manage your levels. Nobody likes to turn up the volume for one song, only to reach for the volume again because the next song is much too loud, or vice versa. If your tracks are unmastered, do a bit of self-mastering by adjusting levels so all your tracks play at relatively the same level.

3. Personalize your demos. If you’re pitching your music for a dramatic project, they don’t care about your comedic chops. Choose tracks that are relevant to what they are looking for.

4. Make custom demos if you can. If you are able, write custom cues just for the specific pitch. Create music that you think would be the perfect fit and place that music at the top of your demo.

5. Assign a cue order. If you want people to listen to your tracks in a certain order, but are just sending a link to files, or attaching MP3s to an email, start your filenames with a track number (i.e. 1 My first track.mp3, 2 My second track.mp3). That way when they save the tracks to their hard drive and listen, they will come up in order and the listener is more likely to listen in that order. If they’re streaming your music via an online player, set the order of the playlist to what you want them to hear.

6. Make your tracks downloadable. If you’re linking to an online player with your playlist, have a download option. Most producers, directors & music supervisors I know like to have the audio files on their computer. If they like what they hear, they may send a particular track to colleagues or even to a picture editor to try and cut it in as temp. Make sure they have the files and can do so.

7. Create clear and consistent file names. Make sure your track names are consistent. Don’t do this:

1m1 Main Titles.mp3
TD_M05_Chase.mp3
The beginning.mp3

Do this instead:

1 The Beginning.mp3
2 Jasmine Main Titles.mp3
3 Chase.mp3

Notice in the first example there are different extraneous things vs. the 2nd example where the titles look consistent, and the numbers also put things in order as described above in paragraph 5.

8. Clean up your metadata. Make sure your MP3 has proper ID3 tags. At a minimum have the track name & your name. As above, make sure the ID3 metadata is consistent throughout your tracks.

How you present your work is probably equally as important as the quality of your work. If you stuff sounds good but is a mess, you’ll probably make less of an impression than if your stuff sounds OK but is beautifully organized and presented.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or add a comment.

Jasmine US Premiere

Jasmine had its US premiere at the Dallas International Film Festival. The premiere was followed by a Q&A session with the filmmakers as well as stars Jason Tobin & Byron Mann. The film has been warmly received and due to popular demand a sold-out second screening has been moved to a larger theater to accommodate a larger audience.

Jasmine US Premiere Red Carpet – L-R Jason Tobin, Dax Phelan, Shie Rozow

Jasmine US Premiere Red Carpet – L-R Shie Rozow, Dax Phelan, Nicole Watson, Stratton Leopold, Jon Anderson, Jason Tobin

The Power of Asking; aka My Father’s 75% Chance of Success Theory

Growing up I was very timid, especially when it came to girls. In junior high there was a girl I liked. A lot. There was a school dance coming up and I desperately wanted to ask her to go as my date, but just couldn’t muster the courage. I was too shy (no pun intended). Trying to help me, my father told me a story – a crude joke:

A man walks into a bar, sits next to a pretty woman and asks her if she wants to go to his place for some late night romance. She throws her drink in his face, slaps him across the cheek and storms off. The bartender says to the man “you must get a lot of drinks thrown in your face?” The man responds, “yes I do, but I also take a lot of women to my place.”

He explained his point was that if you don’t ask, you’ll never get what you want. Thankfully that wasn’t the extend of his advice and my father then followed up with his 75% chance of success theory. It goes something like this:

Generally speaking if you want something from someone, the simple act of asking for it gives you an immediate 75% chance of getting a positive response. How is that possible, you might ask? Here’s how it works.

In order for you to get what you want from someone else you need to want it and they need to agree to it. You already want it, meaning you’re 50% there. Of the remaining 50% they’ll either say yes or no, meaning you only have a 25% chance of getting a no, and a total of 75% chance of getting a yes. On the other hand, if you don’t ask, your chance of getting a yes is zero, zilch, zip, nada, bubkes.

Granted, math isn’t my dad’s strong suit, but he makes a very important point. If you don’t ask, you won’t get what you want. This principle extends to everything in life – if you don’t try you’ll never succeed. But if you try, you might succeed. Just by trying you’re half way there. Of the remaining half you’ll either succeed or you won’t. The odds of success are in favor of those who try.

Over the years I’ve followed this advice many times over. I didn’t know I wanted to be a professional musician until I was nearing the end of my military service (mandatory in Israel, where I’m originally from) at age 21. At the time I couldn’t really read music, I knew no music theory what-so-ever and my keyboard skills were rudimentary at best. Yet emboldened by my dad’s advice, I applied to Rimon School of Jazz & Contemporary Music, and much to my surprise was accepted.

Less than a year later, a team from Berklee College of Music was visiting the school and auditioning students for scholarships to Berklee. I couldn’t play well enough to audition, and I knew it. So I hounded them to let me apply some other way, explaining I was a composer, not a performer. After several days of relentless pestering by me, they came up with a seemingly impossible task – I had less than 24 hours to create a 15 minute demo of my music complete with lead sheets for all songs, plus create a full orchestral score.

Driven by my father’s advice, I worked all night to write my first orchestral piece. I had no idea what I was doing; my first orchestration class was scheduled to begin the following semester. I had recently recorded a 4-song demo, so I created lead sheets for the 4 songs and decided to submit those along with the new orchestral piece as my scholarship application portfolio. I skipped school the next day so I could work on creating the portfolio. I drove to the school near the end of the day just in time to catch the Berklee folks as they were leaving the school to head back to Boston.

My efforts were rewarded and I earned a partial scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music. In retrospect I realize my orchestral score was horrendous – I wrote outside of instruments ranges, I knew nothing of transpositions, it was a mess. My lead sheets were sloppy and inaccurate. But the fact that I worked so hard and delivered everything they asked for was what impressed them. Had I not tried, I would never have gone to Berklee.

I’ve had many similar experiences since. Coming to Los Angeles was another one of those “if I don’t try I won’t succeed” decisions. A few years later as I was building my career I was an out of work assistant and in desperate need of work. I used IMDB, which was brand new at the time, to look up who composed some of my favorite scores. I then looked up who their music editors were, found the their phone numbers in the union directory and started cold calling them all. I made about 20 phone calls. Each and every one of them essentially blew me off. Some were very kind & encouraging, some were not. Some were friendly, some less so. None of them offered me a job, or even a meeting. A couple took my contact information.

I was beginning to doubt the 75% chance of success theory when my phone rang one evening about 3 weeks after I had made all those calls. The next day I was on the Universal lot working on Red Dragon, my first Danny Elfman film. Nearly a decade and a half has gone by since, and I’ve worked on nearly 100 features about 20 of them with Danny. It would never have happened had I not decided to try and make those cold-calls.

I can go on with many more examples of how trying paid off throughout my life. Trying or asking doesn’t always produce the desired results. Just because the odds are in the favor of those who try doesn’t mean they always succeed. But experience has shown me that if you keep trying and don’t give up eventually you’ll get that yes, eventually you’ll succeed.

Oh, and I did end up asking that girl to the dance in junior high… and she said yes.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or add a comment.

Jasmine to Screen in Competition at The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival

Jasmine has been invited to screen in competition at The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival on April 28th, 2015. A year after his wife’s murder, once-successful Hong Kong businessman Leonard To (Tobin) is still reeling from the tragedy. Having lost his job, friends and all sense of order in his life, Leonard becomes obsessed with a mysterious stranger he sees at his wife’s grave, believing him to be responsible for her death. Phelan’s direction shies away from the tourist’s-eye-view of Hong Kong, capturing instead the atmosphere of isolation that lurks within the bustle and crowds. (2015 HKIFF)

Quick Tip: Editing Soundtrack CDs

Quick Tips

At the end of a film, I often have the pleasure of cutting the soundtrack CD. I find this part of the process to be especially fun because there are no more picture constraints, no hit points, no sound effects to compete with. It’s all about the music. It’s also challenging to pick & choose which pieces to keep, which not to include, where to edit (if at all) and in what order they should play. Here are a few quick tips that I use when cutting soundtracks:

1. Start by building a session with all the cues in show order. Trim any empty space in the fronts and ends of the audio files so they are nice and tidy.

2. Shoot for a soundtrack that’s about 45 minutes long. Less seems short. More can be too much. This isn’t a hard rule, if the soundtrack feels right at 44 minutes or 47 minutes that’s fine. Trust your instincts.

3. Get rid of cues that are repetitive or based on other cues. These make a lot of sense thematically in the film, but if they are very similar there’s typically no need for more than one in the soundtrack album.

4. Trim the fat. Writing for film often means vamping, looping, stretching & holding in order to make a hit. Those types of things can be trimmed or entirely cut out of a track for soundtrack purposes. If there’s a phrase that, for example, is in 4/4 but has a 5/4 bar somewhere which was clearly added to accommodate picture, get rid of the added beat.

5. Pick a cue order. Start with the show order and take a listen. If there’s a lull, move things around. If there are awkward key changes that bother you, move things around. There is no formula or science to this – just play around and use your judgement. When you play through the soundtrack and time flies by, you know you’re in good shape.

6. Establish the spacing between tracks. Now that you have everything in order, adjust the spacing between tracks so it feels just right. Again, there is no magic formula. If you’re going from a big action cue into a quiet emotional cue, you may want a longer space between those cues than you would going from two similar cues. Again, do what feels right.

7. If you have the time, leave the soundtrack along for a day or two, then go back and re-listen. It’s amazing how much perspective you gain by revisiting it after a bit of time.

8. Finally, a technical tip. Work with the highest quality mixes you have, and deliver those to mastering. Never down-sample before delivering to mastering. If the mixes are at 96k, deliver 96k and let the mastering facility down-sample to 44.1kHz/16 Bit.

quickIf you have any questions, feel free to contact me, or add a comment.

D Magazine Reviews Jasmine

D Magazine offers a preview of the 2015 Dallas International Film Festival. Jasmine is one of just two films to earn an A- grade! The film’s US premiere will be at the Dallas International Film Festival on April 14th.

Read the full article from D Magazine here.