Here’s a treat: composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, Human Target, Caprica, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) interviews composer Bruce Broughton (Gunsmoke, Logan’s Run, Hawaii Five-O, Dallas, Tiny Toon Adventures, Tombstone). A really superb interview full of great insight, spot-on advice, stories and opinions from two total pros.
Find it on bearmccreary.com here.
Considering a career in scoring for film and television? Here’s a 2009 article in Sound on Sound by Dave Ricard that walks through the low-to-mid-budget process nicely, albeit with a bewildering “it’s not so hard” button on the end of it. I don’t know any professional composers who don’t work really, really hard. (Check out my interview with Bear McCreary to hear more on this.) Maybe Dave Ricard is just lucky.
Find out more about David Ricard’s composing, big band, and production music on his website, lesterbeat.com. Or see his list of television scoring credits stretching back about ten years on IMDB. He’s currently scoring Warner Brothers’ The Tom and Jerry Show.
I recently got to record two very different DVD commentary sessions. One was four or five people for a full episode of The Cleveland Show. The other was a “side-by-side” segment for Family Guy, where the director of an episode was comparing the animatic (black-and-white sketch animation) to the final color version for a few short segments of the show.
I wanted to say a few things about recording DVD commentary, and generally speaking, a full-episode session with several people is significantly more challenging than a two-minute segment with one person, so I’ll focus on that Cleveland session. This setup, though, evolved out of my Family Guy experience and how my counterpart on that show, production mixer Patrick Clark, did it when I was his assistant.