Scoring Perspective

There are usually several perspectives from which you could score a certain scene. Usually, you have the character’s perspective, the audience’s perspective and the perspective of an omniscient narrator. Often, there are even more perspectives and sometimes perspectives overlap but in general, you have a choice, which point of view to take.

Picking the perspective is up to the situation and the development of the story and should be a concious decision by the composer. Obviously, when scoring movies that have a story twist, it is not the wisest choice to take the perspective of the omniscient narrator too often with the music.

If you struggle with scoring a scene or situation and you have the feeling your music doesn’t fit too well, try to see if changing the perspective might improve things. Very often, scoring the emotion of the character(s) in the scene might be a better solution than just “observative” scoring.