Twitter: joecavers Portfolio: joecavers.com
I type this from a hotel room in Las Vegas.
This trip is a perfect escape with people I absolutely love. Tomorrow, more of those people will arrive and we will dance and laugh the night away.
The fact that we will eventually die and leave everything behind is a constant reminder to live in the…
Fuck yes.
![iateyourmic:
thedailywhat:
Breaking News of the Day: Obama Backs Gay Marriage: [UPDATED] President Obama has publicly announced his support for gay marriage in an interview today with Robin Roberts.
I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
Obama, who is the first U.S. president to openly back gay marriage, had come under fire this week for remaining mum on the subject after Joe Biden and Arne Duncan publicly declared their support. The president’s announcement comes a day after North Carolina voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that bans marriage equality.
Obama’s interview will appear on ABC’s Good Morning America on Thursday. Excerpts will air tonight on ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer.
[abc]
Well done, Sir.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3rrnn1KlB1qzpwi0o1_400.jpg)
Breaking News of the Day: Obama Backs Gay Marriage: [UPDATED] President Obama has publicly announced his support for gay marriage in an interview today with Robin Roberts.
I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
Obama, who is the first U.S. president to openly back gay marriage, had come under fire this week for remaining mum on the subject after Joe Biden and Arne Duncan publicly declared their support. The president’s announcement comes a day after North Carolina voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that bans marriage equality.
Obama’s interview will appear on ABC’s Good Morning America on Thursday. Excerpts will air tonight on ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer.
[abc]
Well done, Sir.
As of today, I’m opening the first round of testing for Food Run. Spaces are limited, but open to the general public. Friends, fellow developers, journalists and bloggers most definitely included. I’d also like to invite potential publishing partners to take a look at the game. Details inside.
A few weeks ago, a composer friend of mine Gavin Harrison and I got into an email discussion about the CV a freelance audio person should have, and more generally how to conduct yourself and your career.
We got onto the topic of pricing, and how to appropriately price your wares. Given that I’m not (much of) a freelance composer, I added my friend Rob Westwood to the conversation. I’ve copied and pasted his contributions below, in the hope that they’ll help other freelance composers. Please get in touch if you have something to add to this and I can add it to the post in an edit.
As an aside, please do check out both of these guys and their work. Rob is currently providing us with some tracks for the upcoming LEGO Batman 2:DC Superheroes and he is nailing it!
Hey Gavin,
The question of payment is nasty but I will do my best to help out as much as I can! I’m still never 100% sure about payment to be honest, it’s one of those topics that you’ve got to feel your way around job to job. However, never go lower than you’re willing to go. Try and work out how long it takes you to write a piece of music and get it finished off. I know this can vary but it helps to come up with a number anyway. If I’m at a push I can write about 3 minutes of orchestral music and make sure all the right tweaks are put in to make sure the samples don’t sound naff in about a day. But this has only happened once and I was working from about 8am - 4am… The bigger the music the more work it’s going to take, of course, especially if you’re the one responsible for the mastering process too. If you don’t have to worry too much about the quality of the samples and end up just sending the MIDI along to someone to write it down for orchestra and it gets recorded whilst you sit back and relax… well, you’re probably going to be in a position where the producer has access to a nifty bundle of funds anyway so you won’t be worrying too much about money. I think for a film the music budget is typically around 8% of the entire budget. That 8% goes toward an orchestra/performers as well if required. It could be as low as 5%, or as high as 10%.
Games on the other hand are a tricky beast. AAA pays more than Casual, Casual pays more than Indie (sometimes). And then there are royalty payments (of which I won’t be any help in because I am not a member of the PRS or MCPS yet, although I will be very soon. I advise you to sign up as soon as you can. I wrote the music to a Flash PC/Mac game in 2007/2008 which was picked up my Hudson (of Bomberman fame). They released it on DS and Wii and it stayed in the top Nintendo charts for a very long time (I think it’s still on supermarket shelves). I haven’t seen any money from it (except the pitiful amount I charged for the initial game) and I never signed anything so the rights still belong to me. There was a rather flimsy chat over MSN messenger about the game being ported to DS/Wii which has been lost in the bowels of hard drives. Needless to say, the sooner you can be signed up to a physical royalty/mechanical royalty company, the better. They’re very helpful and I’m hoping they’ll be able to at least give me a definitive answer on my woes with that game! If it takes you, say, a normal eight hour work day to write about a minute of “finished” music, then you can think of a price from there. It’ll always take longer than that anyway when you factor in edits and little extras and such. On those grounds you can then set your price. Don’t forget you’ll never have a string of jobs either so you need to charge more per minute because after you factor in the rest of the days in between jobs working for no pay (updating website/portfolio, marketing yourself, all that jazz) you’ll need to make sure the price averages out. Still, even then you have to be competitively priced. Don’t feel pressured to lower your price though. It’s really worth sharing any specific pricing because they never tend to stick but when you’re working on indie stuff never go lower than about £60-70 per minute of finished music (assuming it’s not going to be needing a huge, fully orchestral sound).
I’m pretty sure you already knew all that anyway! If people are often turning you down because of your price either: a) it’s too high, or b) [much more likely] it’s a good thing because the game would not be profitable for you based on the amount of work you have to do.
Whenever someone asks about pricing, give them your lowest price (if it’s a smaller indie title) but if it’s a bigger company, always ask for budget. It’s worth shifting your prices around for a job that’s worth it, always. Be flexible, but don’t under price if you want to be able to put food on the table, at the end of the day.
I’m not sure where you’re at with a CV, but as Joe said earlier, always but the more eye-catching titles you’ve done at the top. And keep it short. I have a musical CV but I’ve never used it. All jobs I’ve had have stemmed from good networking and an on-line portfolio (which I suppose counts as a CV as it has all my jobs, testimonials, press bits, eye catching logos of the biggest games, biography, demos, videos, blah etc.) The more accessible your site and the easier it is for people to go “oh, he composed for this, let’s listen, ah yeah, awesome, sold” the better you will be. Unless you’re looking to be an in-house composer at a studio, that’s all you’ll need.
I know this e-mail is lengthy! And it’s probably stuff you already know, but it’s all I could think about at the time. Feel free to shoot over any specific questions and I might be able to write something more concise and less rambley. :)
Hope it was a bit helpful! Fire away with any questions.
Cheers,
Rob
Absolutely we deserve to be paid! And a bit more than we are if you ask me. ;) But I may well be biased.
Yes, there’s certainly a level of “freedom” in the indie scene with a lack of contracts and such. The plus side of that when you find a developer you really get along with creatively, you’ve got a great friendship going and there really is no need for contracts (although it’s better to have them anyway). E-mails technically count as a contract/agreement. I was reading up on some cases of freelance artists not being paid the other month and the amount of stories I heard of people not getting paid was unbelievable. Thankfully you can charge interest after your invoice date has passed. And there are some free/cheap services that will send “PAY THIS PERSON NOW” letters on your behalf.
Having recorded with an orchestra is a big selling point for you though. Something I need to do, which I recommend you do, is make sure I have a brief list of the top-end studio stuff/virtual instruments I own and what I have local access to and how much it’ll cost to get an orchestra in, etc. Make sure clients know the service you can offer.
Absolutely, play to your strengths. Recording with the Royal Philharmonic is a big thing to put on your portfolio under things you’ve done, or achievements. Obviously don’t offer something to get a job that you can’t follow through on, but play to your strengths and sell yourself a bit.
I’ve not written any library stuff. How is it? I really need to get cracking with getting some library stuff sorted one of these days… PRS is good for that. I pretty sure the MCPS side take care of all the game stuff as they deal with all the mechanical bits and pieces, DVDs, CDs, etc. But if royalties aren’t written into the contract then I don’t know if you’re entitled to them. I’m not a royalty expert unfortunately. They baffle me! It’s something worth knowing though.
Unless you’re a Superman, you will need to ditch the day job when you start pulling in bigger jobs (although that’s no bad thing!) Having the security of a constant income is a good thing, a nice blanket, but it can also lead to not being terribly productive musically. But I wouldn’t quite the day job until that point where you can see the self-employment taking off.
As for studios outsourcing… I guess the two major players are networking and agents. I haven’t had to go down the agent route yet but networking is something everyone can do. Never brown-nose, just be yourself. Be confident at approaching people. You’ve got nothing to lose by contacting various people/companies as well and enquiring about their need for music. If you’ve got a portfolio or really snappy show reel on-line that they can watch with just one or two clicks, that’s good. Most of the time when you approach people they won’t respond and if they do there’s no guarantee they’ll click your portfolio. The easier you can make it for them, a simple YouTube link to a really snippy, 1-2 minute show reel, the better. It’s hard to get them to listen to your work so if you can do it really quickly and they’re impressed, they’ll be willing to listen to more. But honestly, other than getting some jobs that way a few years ago, everything else has been through having a strong portfolio of work, remaining friendly with clients and making sure I do a good job each time. Things will lead to more things. Keep up the contact, be friendly. My best friend used to work at Sainsburys with someone who was making a film. They were looking for a composer and he recommended me. A few months later Mike (works at Traveller’s Tales with Joe) came onboard to do the sound (he was an old friend of the DOP/editor) along with Luke. We all worked on the sound/music. Got on well. Made some cool noise. Then the next year Mike rang me one day and asked if I wanted to do a couple of tracks for Lego Pirates, so I did. And hoped it went ok! Then at the end of last year they recommended me for some work on Batman 2. Every job comes around differently but it’s definitely “who you know”. But you can make it “who you know” by having a strong lot of music/jobs/selling points behind you. That kind of stuff is vital for sparking conversations and gaining interest and setting you apart from competition. For you, working with the Royal Philharmonic is going to be really, really good, very big thing for a developer/director/producer to see and I don’t see how you couldn’t manage, provided you have a good slick show reel (and ideally some other credits), to start moving in on individuals and “selling” yourself a bit.
Saying that it usually just “happens”, but there’s no harm in pushing it! Make sure you’ve got a good presence, wherever you can, whether on-line or not.
Hope that helps a bit. Again, I rambled. Sorry!
Here’s a first look at chapter 2 of Food Run, “Dessert Island”. Pun most definitely, although perhaps regrettably, intended.
Introduction
Using the practical examples and referring to literature this post will deconstruct how sound design might be used to characterize a piece of film.
Background
Before discussing how characterization can be used in film it should first be understood why sound can be used to…
I’ve just read this blog post http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/
I can’t even begin to put into words how exciting that sounds. I was literally short of breath reading that post. How could any creative person not want to work in the environment described here? And how could you even begin to doubt Valve’s approach, when you look at their output?
I’m not even sure what the point of me posting this was, other than to get people to read it. Those that know me well understand there is nothing I love more than sound, and creativity, and art in all it’s forms. Reading this blog has convinced me that if there’s anywhere that could be considered the objective “best” games studio to work at, it has to be Valve.
I’d say this marks the point that I focus all my efforts into becoming a valuable enough creative that Valve would want to hire me, but that process started long ago. This is just a checkpoint :)
GO AND READ THAT BLOG!
