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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Run
Zeyu Xu
2022The thesis is about analyzing scoring for animation from my own Air Studio Recordings. The topic is approached from historical, psychological and musical perspective to shape a broad understanding of techniques like Mickey mousing.
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Scoring for picture and listening longevity
Stuart Bramwell
2021I have explored the ability to write a musical score that both serves its picture and is effective as a standalone piece of music. I wanted to understand the longevity the music we write has. This is important for numerous reasons, foremost our financial income. With our upfront fee’s often not meeting expectations and backend royalties challenged at every turn, making sure our music is listenable and consumable on a mass-scale is, in my opinion, more important than ever in order to receive streaming royalties. - that is, royalties generated only by the audio being played. The benefits that come with this are extremely rewarding to any composer. To gain an audience with the work you complete is, I believe, crucial. To write music that only serves the picture can result in the soundtrack ‘dying with the film’, so as long as we do serve the picture and write music that fits (as a priority), why not then try and get the best of both worlds and make it then next YouTube hit?
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Fleeting Recapitulations: Music inspired by the novel "Forgetting Elena" by Edumund White
Gabriel A. Gallegos
2021This project describes the motivation, intention, and compositional process behind Fleeting Recapitulations, a piece for piano and orchestra set to Chapter Two of Edmund White’s 1973 novel Forgetting Elena. Throughout his career, White has utilized music theory, terminology, and references to compose modern-day literary masterpieces that seem almost musical in nature. As an avid reader of White’s, I have been motivated for many years to compose a series of short tone poems to accompany some of his works, including Forgetting Elena. For Fleeting Recapitulations, I began the compositional process by creating a palette of tonalities, motifs, and a subtle bass ostinato to reflect the breathing, heart rate, and neurosis of the amnesiac main character. To further incite creativity, I implemented a self-imposed limitation by restricting notes above F4 to all instruments except piano, percussion, and string col legno. A drawback to scoring a novel, which I realized early in the creative process, was that the listener would not see the written material as the music played. As a solution, I created a video containing key passages from Chapter Two of Forgetting Elena which spotlighted the neurosis of the main character and created a cohesive, linear storyline. I then utilized the training I received in visual media scoring at Berklee Valencia to adapt the tone palette I created into a unique, well-synced score for written material. Although my original intention was to use MIDI piano in the final deliverable, a classmate requested to perform and record the part at Berklee’s Ann Kreis Scoring Stage. This further contributed to a cohesive, organic track which captures the novel’s island setting and anxious nature of the main character.
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The Music of The Lost Crystal of Sakara: A Reflective Paper
Ivan Victor Jadresic Aguila
2021The purpose of this project is to provide an analytical discussion about the creation of my culminating experience project of the Scoring for Film, TV, and Video Games program: the music for the trailer of “The Lost Crystal of Sakara” by the Chilean director Ignacio Walker. This includes the process to find the project, the analysis of the story, working with the director, and the research for musical and orchestration ideas. Furthermore, I explain the complete creative process which includes the composition, the leitmotifs of the main characters, the orchestration, the preparation of the Vienna Ensemble Pro and Cubase template, as well as the creation of the final mockup. Finally, I describe the preparation for the recording and the submission which includes the music preparation (score and parts) and the Pro Tools session. I hope this will help further students and film composers to get extra ideas about the process of writing the music for a film and its story.
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Easy as Pie: Composing for Stop Motion Animation
Ryn Jorgensen
2021All film scoring consists of solving problems: technical, logistical, and of course creative. Nowhere is this more true than with animations, which require some of the most nuanced and precise musical treatments in any medium. In this essay, I explore the process of scoring the stop motion animation Easy as Pie, including the research I conducted to prepare, the challenges I faced along the way, and an analysis of the score I eventually wrote to overcome those challenges.
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Adventures of a Lifetime Suite (End Credits)
Natalia Karaseva
2021The following reflection paper presents an honest journey of an aspiring film composer (me) who came to SFTV Masters program from the Silicon Valley world (although previously having a degree from Berklee in Boston) with a dream to firmly follow her calling and become a true film composer who enjoys what she is doing by creating beautiful, cinematic music for films and TV. The final project is the culmination of a nine-month journey of composing and learning new skills in the renowned Masters in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games at Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain. While we still wait for the final recording at the AIR studio in London, this reflective paper will walk you through the process of creating the final composition and its analysis.
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Song of Achilles: A Cinematic Approach to Scoring Literary Narratives
Julian E. Kornick
2021Song of Achilles is the culmination of a year of growth and exploration. My personal objective when I started this program was to go as far out of my comfort zone as possible as frequently as possible in order to grow rapidly and to get the most from every opportunity. After providing myself with challenges in every project up to this one, I had to find a new mountain to climb to continue filling in the gaps in my artistic range. Having been unable to find visual media to score, I had the ability to choose something compelling to me both emotionally and intellectually that would once again stretch my limits. With these criteria in mind, I opted to adapt Chapter 30 of Madeline Miller’s novel The Song of Achilles. This narrative excerpt would push me outside my comfort zone, allowing me to experiment and find other aspects of my compositional voice within a familiar orchestral style. In preparation to write the piece, I researched and analyzed examples of films from the Peplum genre to find appropriate stylistic references and figure out what the key musical idioms of the genre were. After that initial research phase, I experimented with how my own style fit within these boundaries, and how far I could stray from cliches while still being stylistically appropriate and conveying the story’s setting clearly. As a result of the global pandemic and postponement of the recording session, this essay shall cover the process of finding a project, its development, and an analysis of the cue’s compositional elements as related to the narrative.
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The Journey of Inspiration: From Snow Art to Film Scoring
Ann Chia-Ying Lee
2021This thesis described all the processes of rescored the short film One Man’s Walk in the Snow Creates a Giant Masterpiece. From searching for music and video materials, getting inspirations from the materials, compositional process, to scores analysis.
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The Journey of Dovahkiin
Seung Taek Lee
2021This is a project that two fans of the game called Skyrim made and enjoyed.
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Looking Glass and the Principles of Modern Scoring for Animation: A Descriptive Analysis
Sasha Louis Leger
2021Looking Glass aims to provide insight into the process of composing music for animated films through an analytical discussion that identifies and evaluates key scoring principles. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how to integrate certain compositional devices in animation scoring, all the while serving to guide the novice music composer in developing their own approach to the art of composition. The resulting thesis is the culmination of a long personal academic journey in music, and also serves as a personal stepping-stone to the world of professional practice. Finally, this project was produced as a compulsory element towards the fulfilment of the Master of Music in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games at Berklee College of Music.
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Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River: Narrative musical expression from script, poem and visual arts
Peiyue Lu
2021Ode to the Nymph of the Luo River is an animation short collaborated project between me and director Yifeng Zheng. This project is an 8-minute-long animation with multiple cues for different scenes. The music for the CE submission and recording is one of cues that are scoring for the script written by director. The impulse of creating this project originates from my passion for creating music for visual media, and always being inspired from my cultural roots. In this reflective paper, I will demonstrate the whole creative process of being the composer and one of the crew members of pre-production team. This paper are aimed for documenting the journey of completing this project, and being a contributive reference for any future prospective projects that might relates.
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Strangers
Salvatore Mallimo
2021My culminating project was a re-scoring of Eric D. Howell’s film Strangers (2015). I wanted to make sure I wrote a score that really reflected and refracted the film’s simultaneously deeply personal yet superficial narrative. In Strangers, the viewer follows two mysterious, torn, yet oddly connected characters with no obvious motivating source for their feelings and actions. There is no clear hint of where the narrative will turn, why, how, or when. This is aided and augmented by the setting and environment which reflect the characters’ psycho-emotional instability.
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The Last Travel Of Orpheus
Guillaume Maronne
2021‘The Last Travel Of Orpheus’ represents the culmination of what I learned in the Masters’ program with Berklee Valencia, but also the hard work and culmination of my past studies with Berklee Online, which I started back in 2015 as part of my professional reconversion as a film and video games composer. This short film is an original story, based loosely on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which takes place many years after Orpheus failed his first attempt to reunite with Eurydice. It uses only travel materials that I filmed and photographed in June 2020, in the island of Madeira, Portugal. The initial premises of the movie were not known at the time of the shooting, so the idea of making my own movie came much later, as the original scoring project that I found became delayed and the chances to score it for my CE became compromised. This essay explains my working process, from writing the story and creating the movie, to the various aspects of working with sound; from researching the music style, to spotting, composing, orchestrating, sequencing, mixing and mastering, but also planning for sound design and voice-over recording. The later steps of recording and conducting with Air Studios will be presented as how my studies prepared me for this highly anticipated session.
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THE DAMASCUS ROAD: OVERTURE
Charles Mustian
2021This project, as part of the fulfillment of the course of study for the Master's in Music in Scoring for Film, Television, and Video Games program, is a three minute overture for use in a theatrical production. While not specifically for screen, the skills and techniques employed here include the same that are used in both linear and non-linear visual media. Furthermore, through the use of this overture, a wide variety of themes are introduced, developed, and concluded in order to clearly illustrate the narrative content of the larger theatrical work.
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Anxiety: From Sentiment to Audiovisual Music
José Manuel Ortega Caballo
2021Anxiety is a work whose purpose is the alienation from the most primitive as a feeling towards the most abstract as the art of music. To achieve this objective, I will explain in the different areas such as: harmony, rhythm, motives, orchestration, etc. the different use of resources for such alienation. How the three major sections of music work internally and together will be presented. Although the theme to be musicalized may seem monotonous, the intention is to give it heterogeneity but without forgetting the overall structure and aesthetic homogeneity of it. The video presented in this work was created by me, not the images, but the editing and the script were made by me. The music I have composed will try to convey that elemental feeling.
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An Orchestral Rescore of Time’s Down
Alastair Scheuermann
2021This piece of music has been made to culminate my education at Berklee College of Music. Through this project, I focused on developing the key elements of my creative process, and my own musical style. I developed a task-list style creative process that proved to be invaluable as unforeseen circumstances arose during the compositional process. I also showed my own musical style by combining orchestral scores with contemporary elements from rock and pop genres. Here is the vanguard disclaimer stating that the world we live in was changed after March 2020 due to COVID-19. This piece of music has been impacted by the pandemic, and Berklee has enabled me to prepare this cue despite obstacles. This project is to ascertain my fulfillment of the Degree of Master of Music in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games at Berklee College of Music Valencia Campus.
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Mice: A Small Story - Music inspired by the Lord of The Rings Trilogy
Jared Smith
2021For My Culminating Experience in the Scoring for Film, Television, and Video Games Masters Program here at Berklee College of Music in Valencia Spain, I chose to Rescore a Short Animation titled “Mice: A Small Story”. Mice a Small Story was a graduate project by students Jade Baillargeault, Nazli Doale, Dimitri James, Quang Daniel La, Morgane Lau, Mélanie Pango and Manon Pringault at the animation Institute, ISART, in Paris, France. The Synopsis is “In a dark subway tunnel, a group of mice find a gold ring-pull that seems to have a mysterious effect on one of them. Not so far from them, an owl and his enslaved rats are watching. The owl sends his rats to get hold of this strange object...” . If you are like myself, a fan of high fantasy and epics, this plot may sound familiar to you . If you watch the film and are a fan of Fantasy and Epics then you surely won't miss the story the short is referencing. The inspiration behind this animation is the Lord of The Rings trilogy for which Howard Shore composed the music. Throughout the film you will see references to the trilogy not only in the plot but visually as well, which we will talk about later.
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Crossing Bunny Bridge
Steven Stoffels
2021For my CE and final recording in London I have written an original score for an original art project. The project in this case is an animation film, made by a student from the HKU (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, The Netherlands). In close collaboration we have strived for a great animation short, combining the art of telling a story in sketches and graphic skills on one hand and music on the other. What where the exact characteristics of this project and what makes it special?
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IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER
Aimee J. Alexander
2020In Event of Moon Disaster is an ungiven speech discovered in the Nixon archives 30 years after the historic moon landing. This was the speech he would have given had the mission failed. Had Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin not been able to return to Michael Collins orbiting the moon, they would have had to starve to death or commit suicide in space. William Safire, the speechwriter, had not intended to write this version, until a NASA liaison for the White House told him he needed to do it for the “widows-to-be”.
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The Spiral of Life
Ivana Ancic
2020The purpose of this paper is to provide a self-reflection and summary of the whole experience gained during a one year Master Program in Scoring for Film, TV, and Video Games (SFTV) at Berklee College of Music in Valencia. The Culminating Experience Master Thesis project The Spiral of Life focuses on the idea of understanding life, its source and cycles, as a reference point and example for the divine fingerprints of music creation and its beauty. There are many technical aspects to consider for music making nowadays, and composing, now more than ever, can be considered a craft as much as an art made through the act of unconscious channeling. This reflection paper focuses on the creative process, music production skills and techniques, qualities that a composer specifically trained for the purpose of scoring for visual media must have, and challenges they face on a daily basis. The paper contains of xxx chapters that thoroughly describe all phases of the creative, production and post production process, and explains how it all works together starting from scratch - an inspiration, a single motif, connecting musical ideas and building a climax while maintaining the overall structural arc, using technology as a tool to record, produce, edit, mix, and master the composition for visual media or narration. The outlook for success and psychological profile of a composer in media business also represent an important aspect and relevant point for discussion and analysis in the paper.
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Garden Between Walls
Thomas Bingham
2020For my Culminating Experience, I scored the ending sequence from a short film by the name of "Jardín entre paredes" (Spanish for 'Garden between Walls'). The film is directed by Anna Llargués, a student from the ESCAC that I had met through Berklee. In this paper, I go over the research that went into developing such a project, and analyse the score I wrote for it. Through various case studies of films, scores and original pieces from different genres, I determine the technical and artistic tools necessary for the creation and writing of the score. I mobilised these tools throughout the process. On the cinematographic front, I delve into the editing, photography and pacing, while analysing sheet music and recordings on the musical side. I then break down my compositional process by discussing orchestral techniques, musical language and overall sensibility to the scene. The final product blends feelings of nostalgia, triumph and promise to the boyish adventures portrayed in Anna Llargués' "Jardín entre paredes".
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White and Red Flowers
YunJung Choi
2020I tried to orchestrate with Korean traditional musical instrument Gayageum. Through this project, we can see how Korean traditional musical instruments blend beautifully with Western orchestras.
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Bosco Regina
Christopher Robert Gough
2020A short film by Glasgow School of Art student, Sean De Francisco, with music composed by Christopher Gough. 'Bosco Regina,' tells the story of a hunter who decides to take a more unconventional, yet beautiful approach to hunting.
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那时候很单纯的: A Sonic Mosaic of Simpler Times
Helen Hong
2020Growing up, my ideas of love were often in duel. Although I spent the majority of my upbringing in China, I consumed mostly Western media and culture, through which many role models of love quickly took root. American films, books, friends, and social environments together shaped my ideas of emotional expressiveness. From them, I observed majority Western romantic values of intensity, passion, drama. And for a while, this was cultivated in many of my own experiences as well. Recently, however, as I make space for myself to dig deeper into my own inner fulfillment, I have found myself leaning further and further into my parents’ version of love. From their more traditionally Chinese values of love and emotion, I’ve observed simplicity, harmony and trust— hues of blue, rather than red. This piece,《那时候很单纯的》 a sonic mosaic of simpler times, is one that, to me, feels timeless, personal, and makes me smile. My parents have been married for 31 years now, and I hope this piece will put a smile on their faces, too.
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SCORING A CHILDHOOD FAVORITE: The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy: Dream a Little Dream
Mark A. Hull
2020The contents of this paper are the culmination of all the knowledge, experiences and work acquired during the year of Master of Music in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games. Using all that we had learned, we started by finding some media that we would like to score (short film, animation, video game, script, etc.), and the tempo and markers in the media, create a mock-up and several revisions of our score for the media, prepare the score and parts, prepare for recording in one of the most esteemed and respected studios in the world, and mixing/mastering the recording for premier. Having gone to undergraduate for composition, I felt comfortable in my composition, orchestration, and preparatory skills coming into the program. I knew that my biggest challenges would be reading scenes to extract the emotion out of them and creating realistic mock-ups. I had done a little work with mock-ups and scoring for media in my undergraduate, but never really dedicated much time to either of these things. I wanted my thesis project to really showcase my style and be unlike anything else I had done before. I also knew that it was going to be hard work, but it would be worth it. This year has certainly been a strange one with the coronavirus breakout, especially with the thesis project. I hope that someone looking at this reflection in the future might be inspired, guided, and/or calmed by seeing what it was like to prepare this project in the midst of a pandemic, when nothing is certain and everything is changing all the time.