Before We Graduate; Scoring a series
- James Smith
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
We are privileged to work with a number of directors and producers across short films, features films, documentaries and animation. So when we met Chloe Smith who wanted to produce a series of comedy shorts we knew we must be doing something right to be trusted right away with a number of episodes.
The Job
Before We Graduate is a miniseries about two female housemates and best friends, Alex and May. During their final semester at university, they realise they have missed out on the university ‘experience’. Vowing to rectify this, Alex ropes May into creating a bucket list of crazy things to do before they graduate. However, Alex’s enthusiasm ends up leading them into hilarious trouble.
Drawing on influences from pop culture classics, including Clueless, Booksmart, Legally Blonde, and Ladybird, Before We Graduate is a modern day chick-flick-coming-of-age series for all the fellow students like Alex and May, who may feel they have not ‘lived’ enough while at university.
For this project we had 5 episodes to score that required cues to emphasise key moments, provide a framework to indicate the trajectory of the story and show development of both lead characters whilst maintaining consistency between episodes. Beyond the influences above, we were given creative freedom to craft a score that brought the series to life.
Restrictions for this did have an impact on what we could realistically achieve so we had to keep in mind that the budget was extremely tight and the amount of coverage the music needed to span was fair. With this being a self funded independent series, funds were tight to begin with let alone going into post production, so no recording sessions were going to be possible for this project. Everything had to sound great in house with VST instruments, and efficiency in scoring needed to be prioritised through the use of indicator cues.
These are preset cues that are written for specific repeating themes between episodes. An example would be that this show has the framework of ‘the girls come up with an idea’ - Cue playful theme, which then leads to a chaotic climax - Cue the high energy frantic cue. Using predetermined themes or cues in this instance is a ‘multiple birds, one stone approach’ to scoring. It helps in scoring efficiency as you only need a few cues to identify key reoccurring moments. It provides continuity and consistency between episodes and the use of preheard cues can set expectations to cue the viewer to expect the development of a certain situation well before they see it.
Our Process
Each film was delivered individually so we couldn’t score everything together, this was expected, so the initial working of the whole score was developed from the characters in the pilot. We looked at the series descriptors and spoke to the producer about the content of each episode before going back to episode 1 to capture the essence of Alex and May. From this point a bank of cues were scored for various settings and emotional situations.
In this approach we identified that there were moments that reoccurred through each episode; slow relaxed friendly chatter, cheeky suggestions, the activity, and the frantic repercussions. We wrote longer cues than required for each then for each instance adapted the material to synchronise with each situation.
This meant less work for us and a more streamlined approach for the producers to get more bang for their buck. It worked so well that we were able to add to the bank of themes as we encountered more situations rather than directly score every single moment keeping the quantity of music low and the production quality high.
This way of scoring isn’t always the best approach but for the Before We Graduate series it proved the ideal situation and took pressure off everyone.
“I know we are not done yet but I wanted to say thank you already, you’ve been an amazing part of this project, the music really brings [each] episode to another level” - Chloe Smith (Producer)
