Re-Scoring Blockbuster Scenes as Demo Material

Starting out as a composer for media, you very often have the problem of not finding video material to score to either practice your skills or showcase your abilities. As a solution to this problem, many composers tend to use scenes from blockbusters or at least quite big movies as video material to score.

While this is a great way to practice your craft of writing to picture, it becomes quite problematic if you use these re-scored scenes as demo material.

Just yesterday, I stumbled over the web site of a young composer, whose only demos in his "Video" section were re-scores of huge blockbusters. He put together a reel using scenes from such movies as Transformers, Avengers, Spider Man etc. and wrote and produced a score to it.

I can't say that doing something like this has never worked for any composers for getting jobs, BUT there are several considerable problems with this strategy.

1. For any professional that I know, seeing a re-score of a scene as demo material means something like "I don't have jobs that I can showcase" and consequentially "I'm inexperienced in doing actual work, don't hire me." I would argue that demoing even the shabbiest low-budget movie that you scored might be a better idea to bring across professionalism than this. Even editing together some free stock footage that isn't clearly identifiable as what it actually is might be a better idea. Some composers might even think that if they use some lesser prominent scenes and rescore them, potential customers might think that they actually did that gig. In any case, needing to reveal that later on or somebody finding out on their own can be extremely awkward.

2. You can only lose. When doing re-scoring, you are willingly competing against the original composers who have years of experience and large teams and budgets to get the scores to sound like they do. You don't stand a chance at outperforming that. I know with youthful overconfidence you might say "I could easily do something like composer X" but the truth is, you can't (just yet). Your re-score will always be compared to the original (especially on iconic blockbusters/scores) and you will always be the worse version of the two, maybe not even compositionally but at least from the production value.

3. If you're looking for future jobs be realistic about what to expect. There is a next to zero chance that a big shot director browses through your re-scores of multi million dollar cgi battle sequences and says "I love it, let's hire them for our next Avengers/Spiderman/Transformers/Star Wars etc." More realistically, you will be getting jobs for movies with very limited budgets that simply don't have the resources to stage such scenes that you practiced with your rescores. It's great that you know what to do musically when monsters destroy a space city, but that is not going to help you in the beginning of your career. If I were a director looking for a composer for my low or medium budget movie and I would only find blockbuster re-scores on a website, I would probably go to the next web site by a composer who has demos that are more in the style and scope of what I need.

4. In worst case scenarios, putting re-scores online might cause juristical and financial troubles. Some studios aggressively protect their copyright and putting even just a scene from a movie online might cause huge troubles.

So the bottom line here should be to rather keep the re-scores to yourself and as practice ground. Of course nothing speaks against just publishing the audio but don't do it in the connection with the video. It really has way more disadvantages than it might have advantages.