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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Evergreen Suite
William Gerhardt Isaacson
2020As a general description Evergreen is a celtic-inspired video game in development by Grentacular Studios. It represents so much more to me, however. Evergreen represents my entire journey through this master’s program, as well as the birth of my professional career. From the first draft I made for the main theme to the current Suite of themes to be recorded in London, one can hear an enormous amount of growth - all of which I have Berklee to thank for. The growth is palpable, so much so that when I listen back to the first draft I made in September, I barely recognize myself in it. My voice is still in that draft, albeit muffled and hidden. Over the course of the year I have learned to let that voice out and be heard in ways I never thought I was capable of. Evergreen also represents my overcoming a fear of failure. If you had told me a year ago that I would be scoring a full length video game with primarily orchestral elements, I would have a) had a panic attack, and b) not believed you. Admittedly, I accepted this job before I was entirely ready. When I was given the cue sheet of all I would have to do (just for the demo) my insecurities began flooding in. I have always struggled with this in my music. It’s never good enough, I can’t do this, I can’t do that, etc. However, in this master’s course the most important knowledge I have gained is learning that I can do this. I can do that. And after all is said and done, it is good enough. I have the entire faculty to thank for this growth, as every member of the teaching staff has instilled in me a different and unique kind of courage. Finally, Evergreen represents my future. Not only have I made a wonderful connection with the director of the game, it has also given me enough courage and credit to seek out new opportunities. In my application to Berklee my biggest desire was to get my foot in the door in the world of Video Games. Now the door is open before me, waiting to be walked through to the next chapter in my life.
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Channel Surfer
Sandy Jones
2020A three-minute video condensing a typical year in the world of board sports and the weather, climate, and environments they occupy. Includes skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing. The accompanying music is a hybrid score using a traditional orchestra, a rock band, and modern electronic production to help tell the narrative that goes beyond the individual skater.
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Original Score Fonso: Bringing Contemporary Music into a 2D Animation
Ssu-Han (Hannah) Liu
2020The musical narrative in modern animation. In this project, I will be reflecting on my study experience at Berklee, and evaluating the progress I have made. In regards to the reading of narrative, it has changed my vision there are some and comparison from then and now. My experience working as a studio composer has changed my understanding of scoring a scene, and some of the decisions influence my writing. For this research, I will be looking into how I approach my music in order to compliment this modern aesthetic of animation. The challenge of this project is also keeping the consistency throughout, additionally, condensing the amount of material for score, and adapting my music to the new structure of narrative. There are also things related to the construction of this cue, for example, giving a corresponding musical emotion, right tone colour, instrumental tessitura, transposition, and ways of making the best use of an orchestra. I will demonstrate the importance of construction versus the abstraction of the artwork and edits, since this cue only showcased one third of the original content, building a firm and convincing structure is an important support for the animation. I am going to walk you through my process of reading and interpreting this 2D animation, and the decisions behind the scene to make this music convincing and effective to enhance the visuals.
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STAND UP (BLACK LIVES MATTER)
Lavender Looi Ai Hua
2020This project was inspired by the Black Lives matter movement. After multiple considerations and changes in my CE plans, I was finally sure of the project I wanted to work on. My friend, Michelle Raymond and I wrote and produced, I also mixed and mastered this song. We released it on all streaming platforms on the 20th of June 2020. It took almost 2 weeks to complete the project. I then proceeded to write and arrange parts for the orchestra to be recorded in Air Studios, London. I am proud of this project and I hope this brings hope to people and inspires change. TOGETHER WE STAND!
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That Night Has a Color
Francisco Lorenzo Alonso
2020There are no human words to express the pain and the sadness. To begin to understand the reasons why a life so young ends, one must do it through a divine glance. Whether that is love or God herself. I try to do it through music, with the hope to heal that emptiness that is left in the world. I hope that by swimming and submerging yourself fully in the pain, it helps loose the fear of it and therefore, in consequence, we can see the love and happiness again that we only but missed.
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DESERT SONG: a storyteller’s quest
Sanchit Malhotra
2020This paper provides a reflection on the process of completing the culminating experience project for Berklee College of Music’s Scoring for Film, Television, and Video Games Master’s program. The reflection first examines the author’s musical and cultural background and his process in deciding the project’s focus. It then provides a detailed musical and narrative analysis of the composition and how it relates to its subject matter. Topics such as thematic development, harmonic development, orchestration, music production, music mixing, and music preparation are covered. The paper concludes with a reflection on the project as a whole.
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New World on Scoring for Media, Save the Kid
Yu Sze Melody Ng
2020The music I composed is for an animation called Dap Pang Man, which is scaffolder in Cantonese. Using a full orchestra to create a heroic mood of the music. The animation is a short film about Hong Kong culture. I would like to bring Hong Kong traditional culture to my music.
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ESCAPE
Alexander Nikoleit
2020This project is the final composition of my year in the Master’s program “Scoring for Film/TV and Videogames” at the Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus. I rescored a science-fiction animation short movie about a female character who is stranded on a foreign planet and is looking for a way to get back home. I faced a lot of challenges scoring this intense little short movie because it has a lot of different moods and I needed to be very precise on the cuts and the action in the picture. Besides that, I had to program a very convincing mockup because at the moment we are not able to record in London as this is usually the case for the culminating experience. Because of the unexpected happening of Covid-19 and the consequences of public life shutting down in almost every European country, we still don’t know when this session is going to happen. Having the possibility to record a three-minute piece in one of the best recording studios of the world is a big honor and I am really looking forward to this experience. Due to the Lockdown Berklee continued with a lot of interesting and additional online workshops which definitely helped us to overcome this unusual situation. At this point I really would like to thank the whole faculty (Lucio, Sergio, Alfons, Vincente and Pablo for their big effort and those extremely useful and inspiring workshops. I tried to use the time at home studying different scores from various animation movies to prepare myself for this final project. I especially tried to include all the things I learned during this past year at Berklee. I hope that this piece of music is the ideal representation of my abilities of scoring to picture and I hope that my personal voice as a composer is recognizable as well.
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Westworld: Scoring an action cue
Julia Owczarek
2020The Culminating Experience aims to provide a real-life experience for the Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games Program. This paper elaborates on the process of a creation of a score and a mockup. It describes choosing the type of score, customizing the sounds, creating a palette of timbres, mixing and mastering. It includes also an analysis of the score, reflection and conclusion about the whole process. Since the recording with the Air Studios orchestra in London is postponed due to the worldwide situation (COVID-19) the paper does not include a description of the recording day itself.
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Dennis
Carlos Pérez Marín
2020With this paper, I finish an intense year of learning and working in one of the best programs in the world that exists to study scoring for cinema, television and video games. Berklee College of music has given me the opportunity to meet and work with many of the greatest composers on the current scene. Thanks to the intensity of the course, the facilities used both on and off campus, and the excellent work of the faculty, I have learnt and mastered various skills I couldn't even imagine one year ago, before Berklee. As a culminating experience of the program, we have the wonderful opportunity to record our composition in one of the best recording studios in the world, which will allow all of us to meet again in London and conduct one of the best orchestras performing our work. In this paper, I will explain all of the steps that I have followed for the creation of the piece and the project. I will talk about my musical background, my year of experience at Berklee, and how both have helped me in order to create and fulfill this experience. Thanks to my perseverance in composing for an original short film, I met “Dennis”, and I am extremely happy to have been able to compose the music for this fantastic animated short film. This is undoubtedly the best way to end my year, with what has certainly been an experience at a personal, academic and professional level.
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Crossing the Threshold: The Emotional Symbology of Musical Signifiers
Steven Douglas Ross
2020The primary purpose of this project is to represent the Culminating Experience (CE) of studying Scoring for Film, Television, and Video Games (SFTV) at Berklee College of Music. After a year of personal and professional development, students are tasked with writing music for a 51-piece orchestra to be recorded at AIR Studios in London. For my project I chose to write and score a scene from an original narrative. This paper strives to reflect on the idea of ‘Crossing the Threshold,’ a part of an archetypal narrative structure. Additionally, this analysis documents the creative process of writing original music and story. I will describe my artistic development in a continued journey to express my vision of reality, time, and the transformative power of music. This project is a survey of the signs and symbols within the language of film music, and an experiment with the musical grammar and vocabulary that composers have developed for decades to translate music into emotion. Finally, this paper argues that small musical fragments can be assigned to signify specific emotional responses, and this CE is an effort to implement many of them.
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Helga's Sound
Finnur Sigurjón Sveinbjarnarson
2020My thesis paper revolves around my CE project, "HELGA'S SOUND", a film score of about 3 minutes, composed to a screenplay adaptation of a short dramatic sequence from one of the Icelandic Sagas, "Harðarsaga og Hólmverja" written in the early 14th. century. In it I start out by discussing the underlying challenges of scoring audiovisual narratives in general. Then I describe my own process in dealing with my own actual scoring project, discussing the process from the choosing of the material through various bits of research and preparations to the actual work of composing the music. Finally I address my own choices and their consequences as well as writing a few sentences about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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To Nurture, To Nature: Rescoring a Fashion Film
Claudia Torrente Solés
2020Final Recording Project: As part of the culminating experience (CE), all SFTV students have the opportunity to record at Air Studios in London. The goal of the trip is to record a piece of original music performed by a fifty-plus instrument orchestra at an industry-leading studio. Before this, I am going to create a mockup (that sounds as real as possible) and write the score and parts for the orchestra. The final step of this process is to edit and mix the tracks to then deliver the final piece. Since this is a very special situation, I am not going to be able to include the last phase in this document due to force majeure causes; I am going to focus on the previous steps.
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Microscopia: Listening to the Invisible
Lucie Treacher
2020Composition is often concerned with delving into intangible, unseen and internal worlds and watching and waiting for ideas to come into focus. This Reflection paper seeks to map my compositional journey from ‘micro’ to ‘macro’ during the creation of ‘Microscopia’- a piece which celebrates worlds that cannot be seen and yet affect us in minute ways. It explores the challenges I navigated in providing a sonic backdrop for footage of bacteria and mold by Genèvieve Anhoury in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is split into three parts, firstly examining the formation of ideas and inspirations behind the project. It then delves into looking at ‘de-composition’: breaking down the process of creating a three-minute orchestral piece and mock-up. Finally, it reflects more broadly on the struggles of composers during their composition process and simply surviving in the current challenging socio-economic climate.
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Bringing a Story to Life through Music
Alex Williams
2020The Culminating Experience Project encompasses a year’s worth of work, education and experience accumulated during the time a student enters and leaves his or her designated program at the Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus. It is meant to reflect on a real-world experience, which differentiates this paper from other graduate, research-based projects. In the Scoring for Film, TV and Video Games (or SFTV) department at Berklee, this project would typically be referencing an SFTV student’s journey to their final recording project with a 50+ piece orchestra at AIR Studios in London, England. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has delayed the annual SFTV trip to AIR Studios indefinitely. Because of this, the following focuses solely on the writing process and the creation of a realistic mockup that best represents my piece and my accumulation of knowledge at the Berklee College of Music.
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Updating the Future: Reimaging the Sound of Sci-Fi in The Matrix for 2020
Luke A. Williams
2020The objective of this project is to re-imagine the musical representation of The Matrix’s dark vision of the future, with acknowledgement of the 20 years of musical, cinematic and societal development that have taken place since it’s release. The project’s first component is an excerpt of the original screenplay, which was chosen in place of the motion picture so that the music could inform the images rather than being attributed to a vision of the future from 1999. The remaining part is an original score written to this excerpt, composed with the objective of creating a sonic world that reflects the powerful underlying themes of The Matrix, and generating a modern musical interpretation of the world of The Matrix, with the additional challenge of achieving this objective through exclusively orchestral textures.
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The Making of BBC Earth, The Hunt: Sardine Feeding Frenzy
Enhui Xia
2020This project represents my progress and achievement this year in Berklee Master in Scoring for Film, TV and Video Games. This paper records my process of research, choosing the project, composition and my personal experience. Each course I took in SFTV, whether it is composition for different genres, MIDI sequencing, conducting, orchestration or sound designing, have provided me strong support in completing this project. I’ve been through some difficulties working on this project, but good things are a long time in coming. In this special circumstance which COVID-19 swept across the world, college was closed and the recording in London Air Studio was delayed to an undetermined date, I am looking forward to the final recording of this Master program and pray for peace and health for mankind.
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Spring
Jue (Jade) Zhuang
2020This project represents the culminating experience of my one-year study at Berklee College of Music. Through this project, I will show my learning experience and how I learned to promote myself to communicate and cooperate with the directors. I will show the creation method of how I work on a video from a comprehensive perspective. I will analyze my composition and show my ways of thinking regarding harmony, orchestration, music production, conducting, etc.
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Rescoring a Blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron
Laura Blasco Llopis
2019This project shows the culmination of a year full of hard work and different experiences happened in our Masters in Scoring for Film, Television and Video Games. Going through all the processes that we have been taught during the year, we started from finding a video to compose for, preparing a tempo map and markers, doing different versions and preparing a proper Mock-Up, write a score, record in one of the most important studios in the whole world, based in London, and editing and mixing the cue to premiere it finally. I come from a classical background, and some of the parts of this process sound kind of easy to do. But it is true that before doing this degree, I always composed directly on a score, and doing it first on a DAW and then writing down the score was one of my main concerns. But knowing that the goal was going to be recording with top musicians at Air Studios, a famous recording stage where composers like Alan Menken or Danny Elfman recorded, I knew the hard work would be worth it. I only hope that this experience can help future students to understand better what the SFTV Master’s Degree means, and share with everyone what my journey to London meant.
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Sintel the Dragon and Our Journey
Marco Chiavetta
2019When I first bumped into the movie Sintel, I was astonished by the many analogies I was able to find with my life. That story really strokes me. In this paper, I am going to describe the whole process starting from the early stage. I will talk about how I found the video and how I organized the entire music production process. Information about the music composition, the fantastic experience we lived in Air Studio and the post-production work I did on the recording are all included in this presentation.
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Smash and Grab: Rescore
Liu Chung Fan
2019This CE paper focuses on my progress of scoring for an animated short film - starting with contacting the studio, composing for the short film, recording in London and ending with mixing and mastering. This project is not only about my progress, but also my inspiration and mindset while working on this music piece. My music background and the inspiration that I had over years are also discussed in this paper. The main reason for choosing an animated short film is because animation, as a genre, allows a composer to show his/her compositions skills. regarding the complexity and constantly changes on emotions.