Different paths to getting film composer jobs
By Vincent Harris
You can find every type of music under the sun on the Upstate music scene. On any given night, you can go see a country band, a hard-rock band, an acoustic folk artist, an electronic music DJ, even classical music if you feel like dressing up. But there’s another type of music being made by Upstate S.C. musicians that you might not hear that much about: Film scores. In fact, there are several talented local performers and songwriters who have done film scoring work. Say hello to Heather Evans, Neil Lee Griffin and Robert Gowan. All three have been making music for years in different projects. Gowan is the lead singer and violinist for one of our most-unique local groups, Wasted Wine, which combines various genres of world music and macabre lyrical subject matter. Evans has been making music since she was 15 years old, releasing her first full-length album at 17. Griffin’s work is dramatic, dark-hued rock with echoes of gothic composers like Danny Elfman. And in addition to their already-busy music careers, all three compose the scores for films and television.
For Griffin, who has been creating scores for a decade or so, there was never any question about what he wanted to do with his musical career. “It was always the end game,” Griffin says. “I’ve always loved movies but I’m not a filmmaker. So this was my way to do both. When I was young, music was what drew me to a lot of movies.” Griffin first began working in film when a friend of a friend needed a score for a short film. It might not have been his big break, but that was just around the corner. “My first big film was a result of reaching out to the director and just asking if they had a composer,” he says. “From the connections I made from that film, it led to more and more feature films, and I’ve been doing it full time ever since. Which is still pretty unreal.” To date, Griffin has worked on more than 40 projects, including “The Good Things Devils Do,” “Aiding The Enemy” and “BOUND: A Brutal Unflinching Glimpse Into the World of Human Trafficking.”
Evans came by her media-music career in a somewhat abrupt fashion. When she was 18 years old, MTV decided to use two of her songs for their hit TV show “Laguna Beach.” Later that year, three more of her songs appeared in the Nickelodeon program “South Of Nowhere.” “It was a lightbulb moment for me that I could pursue this side of music for the rest of my life,” Evans says. Evans’ breakthrough truly came when the manager at the studio she was recording in asked if she would be interested in submitting her music for TV and films. “I had NO CLUE what he was talking about,” Evans says of the studio manager, “but he was interconnected in the media world and started pitching my stuff through an A&R company called Taxi. As I grew up and continued educating myself, I decided to pursue music in TV and film myself. I started submitting my music to music licensing companies and got signed to a few that pitched my songs.”
Once she started getting steady placements, she decided to start making her own connections with music supervisors from TV, film and ads by going to music conferences, eventually getting placements directly through them, too.
Gowan might be the most likely candidate for film scoring, simply because his music with Wasted Wine is very cinematic in scope, not to mention breathtakingly evocative.
“I had done a little film scoring and film work in the past,” Gowan says, “mostly for projects related to my band Wasted Wine. We’ve always been the type of group to record ourselves and have around seven studio albums featuring rich acoustic instrumentation. We would get approached regularly to lend our music to short and indie features.”
Gowan’s breakthrough came when he met a filmmaker at a party in Asheville, N.C., and decided to take a chance.
“I expressed my interest in learning more about the filmmaking process,” Gowan says, “and started by doing sound on set. I enjoyed working as a boom-op and mixer, but consistently pushed for more composition and sound mixing work. Those films were unpaid, however the connections I made led to bigger opportunities and more work.”
All three say that scoring films and television present their own unique challenges.
“Figuring out what the director, producer or studio wants,” Griffin says when asked about those challenges. “You have to be clairvoyant to an extent to decipher what they are really trying to say. Sometimes they all want something different, so navigating that can be somewhat tricky. The director may want it lighter; the studio may want it darker. Sometimes it’s finding a happy medium and others, it’s letting them talk it over and reach a mutual conclusion before coming back to you.”
“One unique challenge is definitely the payouts being very inconsistent,” Evans says. “It’s a quarterly payout system, so if you had a placement, you have to wait 3-9 months before you are paid sometimes. I try not to count on that money and just look at it as ‘extra’ for my music income. It’s like the sprinkles on top of what I’m already doing in my music career.”
“Any field that requires you to create art for pay has a similar challenge,” Gowan adds, “especially with lower paying jobs. A lot of times you are given lots of autonomy to create art for a collaborative project. This can easily backfire when, after hearing your work, the client then has a moment of clarity on a vision that wasn’t clear initially. This is always a challenge and even for projects with tons of funding you sometimes have to swallow your pride, since at the end of the day you are providing a service.”
Regardless of the ups and downs, all three musicians are thankful for their careers in TV and film. Griffin perhaps sums up the experience best.
“For me I really thrive on doing something brand new every month,” he says, “as opposed to a band setting where you’re playing the same songs night after night at a venue. I love writing a new piece of music, wishing it well, sending it on its way, then moving on to the next idea.”