On this page, you can find the Culminating Experience (CE) Projects for all graduate students from the Berklee College of Music master’s program Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games (SFTV) from 2015 – present. Click on any title for more information and access to the full paper and other deliverables (if available).
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The Social Network: Electronic/Ambient Album or Collaborative OST? (a.k.a. the Importance of Music and Video Editors)
Andrea Federici
2016The Social Network (2010) has been recognized, by both critics and audiences, as one of the best movies of 2010. Its peculiar soundtrack and film editing techniques enhance the sparkling script in such a way that the result is an incredibly dense, almost hard to follow, movie about the creation of the nowadays most used social network in the world. In this paper it will be discussed the unusual creative process that led to the finalization of the soundtrack and it will be analyzed whether such creative process could be an innovative and more efficient way of composing music to picture.
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Music in contrast to psychology: Analysis of Michael Giacchino’s music for Inside Out
Alicia Fernández Morote
2016Inside Out is a movie from 2015 that has gained a lot of success, becoming one of the top movies of Disney Pixar. It won the Oscar in 2016 for best animated picture(1).It is a concept of cinema that tries to go further, presenting two different statements of reality: the interior of the human being vs. the exterior and his/her environment. This is reflected in different aspects of the movie: two different types of animation as well as two different environments that involve different characters. What apparently can seem complicated to understand for a child becomes something simple, moving and fun, due to the fact that the narrative in the movie is very clear and concise. The implicit psychology in every situation, as well as in all the characters, is softened by Michael Giacchino’s music, which gives a relaxed mood indispensable in a film mainly directed to children. My purpose is to show an analysis of a soundtrack that supports a kind of ethic animated film, whose intention is to transmit good values to the children of our society.
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How to Train Your Dragon: The Distinct Elements of Orchestral Adventure Music
Ao Gong
2016As is known to all, adventure music, which usually has a complex and multi-layered orchestration, is hard to write. If the music is written for an animated movie, the piece shall be added an extra feeling of innocence by the orchestrator. Nowadays, a number of orchestrators which are good at adventure music are active in Hollywood. Their compositions exist in various well-made animated adventure movies and really impress the audiences. As a result of their impressive and famous works, the soundtrack of animated adventure movie has been fixed in a certain pattern. In this article, I would like to explore and approach this pattern by analysing the soundtracks of "How to Train Your Dragon", and try to give a review and summary to it, in order to help inexperienced composers familiarize themselves with this type of music quickly.
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The Quiet John Williams: Exploring a less known Side of his Film Scores
Andreas Häberlin
2016The purpose of this research paper is to explore the quieter oeuvre of Williams’ film scores, as well as the key concepts that shaped this stylistic side of his over the last three decades. The topic is approached by selecting and analyzing a specific sample of movies, all scored by Williams. The paper will then put the movie specific findings into relation with each other, demonstrating reoccurring patterns in the composer’s scoring approach.
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Henry Mancini: The Celebrated Songwriter, The Unsung Film Composer
Casey Kolb
2016An Analysis Through the Lens of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
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Life of Pi - The Evolution of the Score
Evan MacDonald
2016The evolution of the score will document Mychael Dana's year long process for creating the score for Life of Pi. As well, it will look into his previous works and study the effect of how this influenced the music for life of Pi. The paper will explore territories that I will personally discuss with Mychael (with a scheduled meeting via Skype) such as making a score for a film that had never been created before. Through studying other works by Dana, I will compare how he chooses specific instruments/specific musical content in order to make a score that is truly unique to the picture.
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THE AESTHETICS AND FORM OF JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON’S HYBRID UNDERSCORE FOR ‘THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING’
Martino Maria Vacca
2016The project focuses on the challenges faced by the composer of "The Theory of Everything", Jóhann Jóhannsson, in creating a timeless underscore for a movie that depicts a time period covering three decades.
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How Music Informs King Arthur’s Quest for Freedom
Maria Mifsud
2016The first time I watched “King Arthur” was when I was 10 years old and from that day onwards, the soundtrack was fixated in my mind. Most notably the haunting voice of Moya Brennan together with the intense action score by Hans Zimmer. I have watched the movie several times and I never fail to get goose bumps whenever the music comes in, especially when I hear the cue entitled ‘Tell Me Know”. Undoubtedly, the movie owes part of its success to the music. In this paper I will explore the different aspects which characterize the score, in order to convey the legend of King Arthur. In addition, I will also be giving an analysis of the themes and the way they are developed throughout the movie.
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The Truman Show: A Musical Analysis
Sabine Ndalamba
2016The paper will consist of a musical analysis of co-composers Burkhard Dallwitz and Phillip Glass’s score to the film The Truman Show. The first section will consist of a brief plot summary as well as a look at the overall relationship of the music to the narrative of the story. The other sections will cover a more detailed analysis of the musical themes, especially as they related to the main characters of the story. There final section will examine the unique artistic voice each composer brings to the film, both as individuals and in the synergy of their collaboration. The musical portion of the culminating experience will consisted of a composition to a student film that is currently in production.
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Rayman Origins: A Musical Melting Pot
Luke Peña
2016Video games often require a large variety of musical styles to match the content of the game, but blending them together is not always simple. This paper analyzes the score of Rayman Origins by Christophe Héral to find what techniques he used to bring cohesion to his eclectic music. Direct study of the music with a focus on instrumentation and orchestration was used as the basis of the analysis, with some outside research done to identify specific traits of various instruments and genres.
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The Master: How Krzysztof Penderecki’s Polymorphia Informs One of Jonny Greenwood’s Main Themes for the Film
Justin Snively
2016This essay will set out to analyze the main musical theme in the film “The Master.” My interest in this research is due equally to my admiration for Greenwood’s music and Paul Thomas Anderson’s films. I find that the squeamish subject matter portrayed in Anderson’s films is complemented well by the indeterminate, and sometimes chaotic orchestral music written by Greenwood. By focusing on the reoccurring theme in the film, Overtones, I will show how it is informed by Krzysztof Penderecki’s concert work, Polymorphia. While this analysis will go into theoretical detail with the time constraints provided, I find that it would be beneficial to complete a thorough analysis of the whole soundtrack and compare it with more of Penderecki’s work.
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Trash Planet and the Sounds of Dancing in Space: An analysis of Disney/PIXAR’s WALL•E as a modern-day silent film
Shane Stever
2016WALL•E has much to offer its audience. The movie explores many good moral themes, has stunning visuals, and impeccable music. Perhaps its most interesting quality is its lack of dialogue. In the entire movie, there are 862 spoken words. This is a small fraction of the amount of dialogue in other films. It is necessary then, that the film rely other auditory sources as well as visual communication to tell the story and relay its information. Films from the Silent Films era function in this same way, but completely relying on non-verbal communication, short of the speech cards that pop up at very important moments. This idea highly motivated me to study WALL•E and its use of music. My main focus in this paper will be on analyzing Thomas Newman’s music in WALL•E, and how the uses of music parallel those found in silent films.
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The Collaboration of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer
Niklaus Vogel
2016In terms of organisation and creativity; how did they share their work and how did this affect the score?
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Fabula Nova Crystallis: The Music of Final Fantasy XIII
Kevin Won
2016When analyzing music in video games, a few considerations must be made. Compared to film and television, story-based video games often have much more footage than there is music. As a result, directors have to get creative about how the music is created or implemented. With certain games inheriting these characteristics we associate from television and film, how does the role of the composer and how we storytell through our music fit in? In this paper, using Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII, the connection between the story and the music will be analyzed in-depth. As games have been growing as a artistic medium, my analysis will be based on how Final Fantasy XIII approaches the problem of staying coherent by utilizing motifs and strategic placement of music in a game.
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A Synthesis of Time: An Analysis of the Music of Assassin’s Creed
Taylor Ambrosio Wood
2016An analysis of the use of different musical stylistic time periods in the video game "Assain's Creed 2".
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The Organ as a Minimalism Resource: A Film Soundtrack & Score Analysis of Interstellar (2014)
Guido Arcella Diez
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Leaping Across Clichés and Thematic Boundaries: The Synthesis of an 'Anti-Score' in Bioshock Infinite
Antriksh Bali
2015While most games have a straightforward objective, Bioshock Infinite as a game has been known to skirt the delicate line between being story-oriented and being a video game where the player can choose what to do. This brings forward an interesting opportunity for music to provide a sense of narrative to the game, which helps in establishing the key role of the music across various different levels and locations in the video game. This thesis aims to explore the strong connection between the narrative elements of the characters in the storyline of the game with various themes and motifs found throughout the music score.
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The beauty of simplicity in a score: An analysis of Horner’s Legends of the Fall
María Belén Vivero
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Jonny Greenwood and the Modern Film Score
Julian DW Brink
2015A Critical Analysis of The Ways In Which The Score for "There Will Be Blood" Was A Groundbreaking Addition to The Literature of Film Music.
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Nightmare Before Christmas: Between Cinema, Musical & Rock Musical Elements in Danny Elfman ”The Nightmare Before Christmas”
Michele Busdraghi
2015Danny Elfman is known for his dark, quirky musical style. In the contemporary Hollywood world there are only few composers that can vaunt to posses this personal and unique style. The industrialization of Hollywood’s cinema has created a standardization in the production, including the music department, but Elfman is an exception in the main trend mainly because of his musical background. He is a self-taught musician that came from rock music, that managed to write several very original orchestral scores such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. How can a person that never studied notation, harmony and orchestration write so much complex and well written music for orchestra? Which are his musical roots, and his masters? Why is The Nightmare Before Christmas so unique and memorable?! In this paper I will answer to these questions focusing on the musical elements that Elfman developed during his career; these approach will bring us back to the beginning, trying to establish musical connections that explain how his style has developed. Some of these connections/relations are direct (for these I will make a graphical representation), others more subtle (non-direct).
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Music in an animated movie with almost no dialogue: Analysis of the soundtrack and score of Wall-E
Bernardo Castro
2015This paper aims to analyze the role of the music within the movie Wall-E, and especially to deconstruct what it is that makes the narrative move forward in a movie that has very little dialogue.
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The Time and Space: Score Analysis and reflections on WALL • E
Emanuele Contis
2015The first hour of Wall-E is a crazily inventive, deliriously engaging and almost wordless silent comedy of the sort that Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton used to make. In almost 100 minutes of movie there are about 80 minutes of music. My analysis focuses mainly on the styles used by Newman and his aesthetic approach to this amazing score.
