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So You Want to Compose for Film & Games
How to Start a Career in a Misunderstood Landscape

Finding work as a freelance composer in film and games is without a doubt one of the most misunderstood creative endeavors out there. Most people who are interested in pursuing this career are simultaneously daunted by misconceptions that make the prospect of ever earning a living feel impossible and uncertain. While media composing is certainly a career path that takes a fair amount of patience, grit, and focus to be successful, it doesn’t need to feel as insurmountable as it likely does to you right now.

It’s quite common amongst beginners to feel apprehension about “taking the next step” and this can stand in the way of progress. In order to help ease this tension, I’d like to debunk a few common myths we tend to tell ourselves before embarking on this career path. After reading, it’s my hope that you’ll have a bit more clarity about what next steps you can take to make a great impression on your network and start landing gigs. Let’s dive in!

If you’re looking for your next opportunity to improve, I suggest two general areas to explore:

Improve your orchestral mockup chops & learn the ins-and-outs of software synthesis.

There’s nothing quite like delighting a client with a convincing orchestral composition that you programmed using nothing but computer software and perhaps a midi controller or two. And in order to deepen these skills I highly recommend you check out Zach Heyde’s Orchestral Mockup Fundamentals Course. For a very fair price you get access to a practical breakdown of how to accomplish expressive realism with your orchestral compositions. This knowledge will impress clients and potential leads. It’s a total game changer once you’ve gotten to the point where people ask you “so, you must have recorded this with a live orchestra, right?” to which you can respond “Actually, I did all of this right in my computer”, and watch as they respond with wonder and amazement :)

If you aren’t quite ready for a paid course, there are plenty of free resources out there to get you started, including this YouTube series on orchestral music production by the talented folks at Master the Score.

Another area of improvement that can help you across countless facets of music production is honing your control over software synthesizers. The difference between being able to intentionally craft your sounds rather than endlessly scrolling through presets until you land on just the right one can be an immense time saver and quality booster. To sharpen this skill I refer you to Syntorial: The Ultimate Synthesizer Course. In this course you’ll learn basic, intermediate, and advanced principles of software synthesis and receive the first 20+ lessons for free. So you can test and explore before deciding whether or not you’d like to commit.

In addition, I also highly recommend the immense repository of courses and tutorials at ADSR Sounds. With a fair mix of free and very reasonably priced material, they cover all things synthesis and beyond. Simply browse their courses and tutorials pages, find the topic that you’d like to improve on, and deepen your educational journey.

If you’re interested specifically in the video game side of things, audio middleware is something else you should consider learning. This is what game composers use to configure music they write so that it can be placed into a game and respond appropriately to various game states. I won’t douse you with the technical details here, just know that a deep understanding of this software can help distinguish you from other composers also trying to break into the industry. You’ll also be saving programmers quite a bit of time, so they’ll be happy to have you :)

The two main audio middleware softwares are Wwise and FMOD, both of which have tutorials on their websites that show you the ropes. However, since the FMOD tutorials aren’t quite as intensive as the Wwise ones, I’ll also point you to Sergio Ronchetti’s FMOD Challenges course. I recommend going through the basics on the FMOD website though before diving into Sergio’s course. As the name suggests, he challenges you with solving real world scenarios instead of simply presenting you with step by step instructions of how the software works. So it may be smart to get your feet wet with the basics before diving in.

Okay, moving on…

Similar to misconception #1, this idea basically stems from our propensity as creatives to let our high standards in one area inhibit progress in other areas. If you really want your website to be perfect, that’s totally fine! Work on it and tinker to your satisfaction. Just don’t let its “incompleteness” convince you that you aren’t ready to start meeting potential collaborators and landing work.

Polishing our websites until we’re certain it’s ready for presentation is an easy way to trick ourselves into ignoring the hands-on task of building our network. Having a good website can be an important part of landing work, no doubt, but so is building and investing in relationships with people, whether that be in person or online. The truth is, most of your clients will consider your site as secondarily important to them simply liking you and wanting to collaborate with you as a person. Some may not even listen to your music at all before they show interest in working with you! It blew my mind the first few times this happened to me, but it does indeed happen.

That said, here’s what you should know about building a website so that you can position yourself properly to your network, without obsessing over insignificant details:

A. Make these three things one click away on your landing page: 1) an easy way to contact you 2) a direct link to your music 3) a nice looking list of projects you’ve worked on.

B. To be honest, that’s really it… At this stage the rest is just fluff.

Here are a few composers I know who do this on their websites very well: Will Roget, Kati Falk Flores & Ryan Ike.

You’ll notice that many composer sites include much more than the three components just mentioned. Additional material to help you stand out is great to add, and you should continue to update as you advance in your career. Just remember that the 3 essentials mentioned above are all you need to get started.

A similar piece to consider is your demo reel (i.e. what pops up when people click on your “music” button). In addition to presenting your music by project or by genre, which is what you’ll see on most professional composer sites, I also highly recommend creating a compilation track to present at the top of your reel. This is a 3-5 min long track of 20ish second snippets of your best music back to back. This can be especially useful to newbies who don’t have any projects to their name yet, but still want to make a powerful first impression on their site. I don’t see this as much from other composers, but I can personally attest that my variety reel has been a key ingredient to landing certain gigs.

Alright, let’s discuss networking!

This is really where the virtue of patience comes in. It’s important to understand that people hire based on one primary emotion: trust. And trust between you and your future collaborators can take time to build. How much time? Well, as my mentor Akash Thakkar likes to say “longer than you think it should”. So strap in and continue showing up, because you’re in this for the long haul!

There are many reasons why someone might trust you enough to hire you. Perhaps you both to attend the same events and over time they begin to see you as a peer rather than a novice, maybe they’ve listened to your work and are impressed by your capabilities, maybe they’ve noticed you regularly engaging and sharing your work on social media and see you as a thought leader in your field. Eventually you’ll get to the point where you receive work referrals from other people in the industry. This is perhaps the most frictionless way to earn a new client’s trust. But again, getting to this point takes patience and persistence. And this is the main thing to keep in mind while networking. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Something else to consider while networking is that you don’t need to pitch yourself. In fact, getting too “salesy” can really turn people off in conversation. Rather, simply take genuine interest in others, ask thoughtful questions about what they do, and when given the opportunity, be prepared to talk about your own niche interests in detail and with passion. Excitement is contagious in conversation, and if you lead more with this mindset, overtime you’ll build genuine friendships with people in the industry. This will in turn increase your chances of building the necessary trust to land paid work.

If you live in Seattle and are looking for film connections, here are a few groups you should look into to get you started:

Seattle Film Society, FCT (Film Community Training), Women in Film Seattle, & SeaDoc And if you’re interested in games, I recommend starting with Seattle Indies & Seattle Game Audio

If you’re tuning in from beyond the Coffee Capitol, meetup.com is a great place to find local events related to your area of interest. Just type into the search bar your city along with a few keywords, like “filmmaker meetup" or “game developer meetup”, and see what appears.

My favorite way to stay connected is to subscribe to email lists and keep and eye out for events in my inbox which include some sort of networking. Then I simply attend as much as I possibly can. Frequent attendance is especially important if you’re in the beginning stages of your career. Showing up early and often might be the most overlooked and necessary ingredient to helping you build momentum starting out.

Before I close, I’ll touch on how to stay visible online as well. The avenue I suggest when it comes to social media is rather passive when compared to that of, say, a YouTube or Instagram influencer, but just active enough to gradually garner trust in your online circles. It basically boils down to routinely engaging via comments, likes, shares, and DM’s while posting consistently, but not necessarily often. And I recommend this approach to beginners and industry vets alike, since it allows you to make a steady impression with your online network, without having the “social media grind” taking up all of your time.

My current platform of choice is LinkedIn, but I encourage you to choose whichever one feels right for your industry and interests. I do, however, recommend focusing on one at a time. I know it feels like a risky trade off to abandon one profile in pursuit of another, but in my experience, it’s the only way to make real progress when you’re mind is also split between a million other things at once.

When engaging, keep things simple. Comment on peoples posts with whatever, thoughtful, curious, or silly thing comes to mind. DM people you notice on your feed thanking them for sharing their work. Share interesting articles with friends you know in the industry. More important than the exact thing you do or say is that you’re simply being genuine and staying active. Do this regularly, and folks will begin to notice.

When posting, again, I recommend keeping things simple. Do a little research and figure out what performs well on your platform of choice. For Instagram, it may be reels of you live performing into your DAW session, or midi screen captures overlaying a movie clip you scored. For BlueSky, you might share your thoughts on industry trends or examine aspects of your favorite games. My current LinkedIn strategy is to 1) share industry insights, much like the ones I’m sharing with you today 2) share various screen captures of my work and 3) share personal updates about projects I’m working on or events I’m attending. The point is to form these content pillars (3 is a good place to start) and batch create content regularly. This way you’ll build a repository to draw from whenever you’re putting together a new post. Depending on how much you create, you may have enough content to post once a week, or maybe just once a month. More important than your frequency though, is your consistency. Remember, marathon mentality.

Okay, I’ve given you a lot to think about. But I’ll leave you with a few additional resources.

If you’re interested in quick ways to start collaborating, making connections, and gaining credits, I suggest you check out your local chapter of the 48 Hour Film Project and the endless amount of game jams out there to contribute to, including the annual Global Game Jam. These are opportunities to join a team of scrappy production or development teams in order to create something screenable or playable within a short period of time. And groups are pretty much always in need of a music/audio person to help out. I highly recommend that you ask about these during networking events to see who might need someone like you to join!