Fermatas in Film Scoring

When scoring a movie by writing score sheets for the reason of having  it played by real instruments at one point, avoid fermatas and breath marks. These musical markings are very open to interpretation and it get’s even more complicated to create click tracks for cues that include them. If you want such a musical effect, in a film scoring environment, it is better to write them out in absolute values. Let’s say you want a fermata on count four of a 4/4 bar, in these cases you would rather make this bar for instance into a 5/4 and sustain count 4 over two beats. In this case, it is very clear for everybody how long that note will be and it is easy to anticipate when to continue after that note. This is something that purely applies for film scoring, especially with recordings to click. In concert music environment, there is no problem whatsoever of using such markings.