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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Niamh O’Meara
2022My culminating experience is a three minute orchestral piece inspired by the book, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy. It includes a reflective paper piecing together the narrative behind the music, uncovering the right theme and harmony to do it justice, exploring the colors of the orchestra and finally detailing how the final piece came to be. The piece incorporates the essential themes presented in the book, namely, fear, love and hope, and is an ode to following your instincts and forging your own path.
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From Student to Professional
Beau Schaepman
2022The power of improvement is in many cases a process of flow in a subconscious mindset. Humanity learns by experiencing new scenarios in a practical environment and by shared wisdom provided by experts in (master)classes, books, internet, and other theoretical sources. But to truly master the craft of a profession, it takes dedication, awareness and control. In this paper, I will describe the whole process from being a starting Berklee SFTV1- Student to a fully prepared professional Film, Television and/or Videogame composer. With as cherry on the cake the final result of the music I have made for the game ‘The White Raven’, which is recorded in the AIR Studios in London. I am going to share my experiences, thoughts and feelings based on the successes and failures of this year. Information about acquisition, networking, inspiration, music composition, music preparation, conducting, recording and post- production are included in this paper. Primarily the information written in this paper could be useful for aspiring (starting) musicians, who would like to know more about what it takes to be a composer for Film, Television and/or Videogames.
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MC Fox
Nimrod Schwartz
2022In this academic work, I will examine and go through the composition progress of my Culminating Experience Project, MC Fox. This project is a musical piece I composed for a full orchestra for a short animation movie called “MC Fox”, created by the Israeli animator Tamir Zehavi. This short is my first credit as a film composer and the first film that I wasn’t re-scored. I will start my work by examining the exposition of the piece, and then I will analyze the different parts of the piece one by one in the following order. In each part of the score, I will share the themes I composed to this animation short and discuss how I used them during the movie. I will also share my orchestrating progress and the way I used the different instruments of the orchestra and the different sections of it. In addition, I will touch on issues such as the style I chose to compose, the way I divided the short into different sections, and how I synced the music to the picture. I want to thank my Directed Studies Professor Sergio Jiménez Lacima for guiding me through this proses.
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Noble Heart: Composition for a Fairytale
Alicia Sevilla Redondo
2022This project describes the creative process, the technical development, the search for resources and the human growth that have culminated in my first composition for orchestra, inspired by a fairytale. I have attempted to describe through music the most intimate and human emotions of the characters, making visible what is invisible to the simple eye. For this I have put into practice everything I have learned throughout this intense and fruitful course, which has led me to create an orchestral work and experience recording it live with the most expert musicians in one of the best studios, Air Studios in London. At the same time, I can recognise the importance of the support, the help and the accompaniment that my family, teachers and close friends have given to me in this culminating experience. I am excited to imagine that this is just the seed of a very enriching professional future, because I want to continue growing to share my best professional work and my passion to the world.
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The Next-to-Last Time I Was Shot out of a Cannon Short story by: Etgar Keret
Aviram Spies
2022In this reflective paper I will attempt to summarize my experiences here at Berklee, both in general and most importantly in relation to our final project. I’ll be looking into my journey, trying to explain my personal, musical and composition choices I’ve made towards writing this piece. Though this project might feel similar to our previous tasks here at Berklee, this one was far different and challenging than everything we’ve done, and certainly one of the most interesting and more challenging projects I was lucky enough to work on. Throughout my time here in Berklee I got to learn so much more than I can fathom. Beyond the much needed technical skills, and theoretical knowledge, I’ve learned mostly how to develop my own musical language. Learning through trial and error, with each and every time I try to dip my toes in freshwater, looking at new horizons and connecting my new experiences with the past. I’ve learned to look at stories and narratives in new and refreshing ways while trying to constantly make the musical and emotional connections.
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Barcelona: A Composing Journey
Aida Ten
2022The main focus of this project is the process of composing for a 3-minute film. It describes pre-production, production and recording in London, and post-production. My goal was to record very different musical genres that I can use as my portfolio in the future. I started this project looking for an original video to write the music for, and ended up recording it with a videographer so I could write the music I liked, and I could use all the instrumentation we had available. The project led me to a review of every part of the process and make every detail my own. Even though I could be better in some areas, I feel like I am ready to work in the professional world at any of these stages.
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Superhero for Mayor
Alexander Wiederock
2022The goal of this Culminating Experience project was to write a 3-minute piece of music for a video or script to serve as the exemplification and reflection of everything I learned during my year in the Scoring for Film, Television, and Video Games Master’s program at Berklee Valencia. To achieve this goal, I wrote an original score for the animated short film, "Superhero for Mayor", in collaboration with its creator, Hank Farr. To accompany the theme and tone of the video, the music incorporates elements of the military topic, and recalls the scores of classic superhero films, such as those of John Williams. The process of completing this project included the composition of the original music, orchestration, score and part preparation, conducting during the recording session with a 51-piece orchestra at AIR Studios in London, editing and mixing the recorded music, and finally, the placement of individual cues from the final mix at their sync points in the animation. The experience I gained through the creation of "Superhero for Mayor", particularly with the opportunity to score for an unfamiliar genre and the challenges it brought about, will definitely benefit the completion of any future projects to come.
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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?