Orchestrating and Producing Music for Film and Games

Today, more than ever, music fulfills a vital role in feature films, television shows, and video games. While album sales continue to fall, music placements provide writers with an effective new way to reach potential fans and make money. These modern revenue outlets require a detailed understanding of orchestral writing skills, specific production techniques, and a deep knowledge of the unique facets of these particular music segments.

This three-course specialist certificate program provides students who already have a strong background in music with specific skills dedicated to advancing their writing for films, T.V., and video games. The program begins with Orchestration, where students will expand their writing knowledge base, and apply traditional and emerging orchestration techniques to both sampled performances and live orchestral performances. The course also teaches students how to create modern day orchestral sounds and identify the characteristics and idiomatic writing techniques for each orchestral instrument family: strings, brass, woodwinds, and percussion, as well as approaches for writing for full orchestra.

From there, students will focus on the aesthetics, terminology, procedures, and technical aspects of film scoring in Film Scoring 101. By using a broad range of techniques including click tracks, spotting, scoring under dialogue, free timing, and the creative use of overlap cues, students will learn how to develop a dramatic concept for a score and how to synchronize it seamlessly to visual events. Students will also learn some invaluable self-promotion tips throughout the course, such as creating an effective scoring demo and ways to collaborate on scoring projects.

This certificate program concludes with Introduction to Game Audio, which covers the many facets of sound production and engineering that are particular to games. This course covers typical studio effects, sound manipulation, and addresses technical hurdles you might encounter along the way. Students will also study more advanced concepts and techniques such as recording custom effects, proper integration of audio, and mixing techniques for gaming.

By the end of this program, students will have a solid orchestral, film scoring and game audio background that can be used to further their career creatively and entrepreneurially.