Extended Practice: Markus' Final Score and Reflecting on Collaborating with a music student

So Markus sent me the final score for my animation and I am very happy with the final results. Again it fit really well with the animation footage and it was evident that Markus benefited a lot from having the animatic at his disposal so I felt like he would benefit even more from having me constantly sending him re-edits of the animatic with newly added footage.

It again fit really well with the animation but what I most liked about it is that he had expanded on the original snippet of music that he sent me so much. It starts out quite upbeat and happy and then delves into something completely different by the end, all the while keeping with the same beat. I told him that the score reminded me (in a good way) of the Netflix series Stranger Things and the soundtrack of that show. He replied to this by saying he created with this by experimenting with 80's sounds and was actually inspired by that show.

The experience of working with Markus has been very successful to me and has taught me a lot about collaborating with musicians. I was pretty lucky to find Markus but I feel I was able to find Markus due to the fact that at the time of meeting him I'd already had an idea of what I was making, in that I already had a draft storyboard to show. A big part of why Markus wanted to work with me was that he was passionate about my idea, I went to Leeds College of Music on that meet-up day with almost like a pitch to present, therefore I had an idea of what I was looking for which really helped.

It wasn't all smooth sailing though. There were things I did back in January I wouldn't do again with working with a music student. For example I felt like it was fine at the first meeting to try to talk to as many people as possible and get as many people interested as possible, just because I felt like it would give me more options further down the line. However at the time after the meet-up Markus and another music student was very interested in working with me. I, quite naively felt like this wouldn't be a problem further down the line and they could both produce music for the animation or collaborate. But I hadn't considered the guidelines of their submissions like I had my own. I waited around a month (mostly because I was working on other aspects of the animation) after they had expressed an interest before actually mentioning they were both interested in collaborating before finding out that for their submission they had to work on it individually, one music student per animation. I had to let the other student go, just because I felt like Markus was a better fit, although I felt awful and unprofessional and felt like I had wasted this other person's time.