Understand The Filmmaker’s Creative Vision To Maximize Your Sync Placements

Every artist is hoping to get their music used in television, games, and films. It's become a critical metric of success for both independent and signed artists in the streaming era. The purpose of Soundtrack Production is to empower you with the methods and techniques I use as a composer, music supervisor, songwriter, and record producer to achieve thousands of music placements in television and film. My success came from learning to analyze and understand the creative vision of the filmmakers, and combine all four of those skills in every piece I write. Throughout this program, I will share my 20 years of tradecraft in all aspects of writing music for picture. 

My first piece of advice to every songwriter and musician who wants to license their music for sync placements, is to realize that your music has to become part of an existing production that already has a defined look, sound, story, and cinematic style. All of  those elements have been honed to satisfaction by the creators, producers, directors, writers, actors, network executives, editors, composer, sound FX editors, and music supervisor. Your music needs to fit their production and elevate their vision. 

There are two ways that can happen: 

The first way is for the filmmakers of the show to hear your music somewhere, and intrinsically recognize that it is a perfect match for their creative vision as a story teller. A simple comparison might be how a great painter innately chooses the perfect color accent to complete a picture, or an interior designer chooses fabrics and fixtures to match the theme for a home they are decorating. It’s creative instinct. There are no rules or laws to film music - just instinct. 

In this case, it must appeal to the filmmaker's creative instinct in the same way as each line of dialog written into the script, every performance by the actors, and each camera angle and visual effect. If your music impacts them enough on first listen, they will connect it mentally to a specific scene they are editing, audition it to picture, and evaluated if it enhances the story. This type of organic connection of music to picture does happen, but making a career in licensing music requires consistent placements, not being the occasional needle in a haystack.

The second way is for you, the artist, to be proactive and learn to analyze your target productions to understand how, when, and why they use music to enhance their creative vision. It's critical to put as much, or more focus on the music instrumentally as it is the vocal and lyrics. Once you learn this process of analyzing the creative vision, you will boost sync placements of your existing music, and begin to craft new music that is a perfect fit for your target projects.  

I do this on every piece of music I write, whether it’s the end title song of a feature film, or the theme of a game show. My music needs to capture their creative vision. It’s a great skill to learn, and once you understand it you’ll find that your music will naturally become that organic fit with the cinematography, story, characters, editing, visual and sound effects, and the many other elements of the soundtrack. You will begin to take control and drive that organic connection the filmmaker is seeking to elevate their story.