Happy New Year

Hope everyone had a wonderful New Year. Mine was pretty quiet. Lauren and I spent time with her family during the day, played some board games, and made a fort with her little sister. Then we went out for dinner and were thinking about going to the space needle, but decided it was too cold and driving back would be a nightmare so we stayed in. We went to a friend of the families for a little while, then stayed in, enjoyed some ice cream and cookies and watched the Dick Clark special.

I should also mention we went and saw Tangled in theaters, and what a wonderful movie that was. If Disney movies continue on this trend, we have some great films to look forward to. But if you look in the credits, the executive producer is John Lasseter who is responsible for making PIXAR what it is, so it's no wonder the film was good. And the music was spectacular. Alan Menken wrote the score, and after hearing it, it's no surprise he has more academy awards than any other person. So naturally when I got home, I bought the soundtrack right away, and now I need to write music for a living more than ever. Childrens music is where I want to end up. I feel you can write in any style, in any genre and any way you want. Kids movies are like huge sandboxes that you can make anything in musically, and that's such a cool concept to me. So, feeling invigorated again, I looked for any job listings that may exist for film composers anywhere so I have some options when this fellowship is over. I'm within walking distance of ABC, NBC and a Disney office, so I checked the websites under their careers and job listing page, and here's what I found out.

The film scoring community isn't just a closed community, it's like a secret society. The jobs don't exist. There's not even a music category on ANY of the websites. They don't want applications from composers. I imagine the reason is because there can be only one composer for a film or TV show so they don't want to drown in resumes from every single person who writes music. It's unlike any other position, where you require a team of people to get the job done, so it makes sense; it's just frustrating. I guess the director or creative people in charge of the projects want to choose from a list of known, good composers rather than risk having the soundtrack scored by someone they've never met or worked with before.

So more than anything else, I'm hoping I'll get some names and contacts from this fellowship. I hope that I can get information on who I can send my music and resume to or who I can attach myself to that will take me behind the closed doors of this secret society so I can play in this sandbox I've been dreaming about. I bought my plane ticket from Seattle to Burbank yesterday so I'm all good to go. Just one more week and I get to see what this is all about.