Re-scoring the Stargirl clip, what I learned, and my new version of the clip

mattboone

This contest was an amazing learning experience for me, mostly after the contest was over and I went back to my entry to see how it stood up. With thousands of entries, none of us could expect much feedback, but I listened to what Pinar and Paul said about the winning score and then looked at my own submission with fresh eyes and ears.

I wanted to share this experience in case it can help others. First I will share my original clip, the version submitted for the contest, followed by my own judgement, then a new version that I only wish I had come up with in the first place, haha! Here's the original:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sERIRh77N0s

So right off the bat, if I was judging this entry, I might not make it past the first 10-15 seconds. It's not original, and while I'm hitting the action cues, I've built in too many tempo changes and relied on single note bwaaas to get it done. It sounds like a score that's been done hundreds of times before.

Then there's the upper strings and woodwinds flailing about, lol. Those long runs sounded cool when I first wrote them, only because I had never written something like that with this type of video in the past, but now I only hear noise. It's just filler to get to the next bwaaaa, and it's boring. (Thus why I would have quit early and moved on to the next entry.)

Too many long held notes between cues, the movement of the scene gets lost. Again, those tempo changes are too frequent, even the key change was unnecessary, and the ostinato in the climax of that first half (while the bus is getting rescued) doesn't fit with the rest of the music. It takes me out of the scene instead of pulling me into it.

Why didn't I see it that way the first time?

I was married to my first ideas. I asked a couple friends for input before submitting, but I never tried to write something completely different. Then I got hung up on creating a rocking outro for that title splash and thought it somehow made up for the bland music right before. The beginning and end of this score were the weakest points.

Then I listened to Score, The Podcast, recent episode with James Newton Howard, when he said "Rewriting is harder than writing, and the sad thing is, you're going to spend most of your time rewriting. Anybody can write." and that was like a wake up call. I've done tons of videos just for fun, just for myself, but I've never gone back and thrown out my original idea to start from scratch.

So that's what I did. I eliminated all the tempo changes but kept the starting tempo, and approached this scene as if I had to present a new idea to a director who hated my first attempt, lol. The new version came together much faster than the original, and I'm so much happier with it.

Here's my new version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEcVqBPGpkk

It's still not a winner, doesn't even compare to Chris's excellent winning score, but the lessons I learned re-scoring this scene were the most valuable part of this experience.

Has anyone else considered redoing their video, just to see what you can do better?