When I say the word "composer", there's a good chance that one of three things pops into your mind: Any one of John Williams' iconic movie scores, the cinematic horns of Hans Zimmer, or even your favorite cartoon theme song from your childhood. Music helps to inform the emotional journeys our heroes take in television and movies, be it an independent project or big-budget franchise picture. Fast-paced, dynamic scores complement action sequences; powerful musical swells take an epic discovery to new heights; and sombre tones enhance an already emotional moment. Now any creative project is a team effort, but an integral member of those teams is, of course, the composer.

But what exactly does a composer do? What's the scope of their job? And how does someone who's musically inclined even manage to break into this highly competitive industry? It's with those questions in mind that I spoke to active composers Jake Monaco and Sebastian Evans, both of whom were recently mentioned among the top composers in the animation industry, and who kindly gave me a crash course in Composing for TV and movies.

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Monaco is currently scoring Amazon's preschoolers show The Stinky & Dirty Show, Netflix's Dinotrux, and Warner Bros. Animation's Be Cool, Scooby Doo!, and recently composed the score for Keeping Up with the Joneses, while Evans is composing music for Nickelodeon's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and has worked on Transformers: Animated, and Ben 10: Omniverse, among others. Their careers, of course, have similarities and differences, just as their own preferences differ despite having a passion for music in common. For example, as far as instruments go, Monaco prefers the guitar and finding new ways to get unique sounds out of it, while Evans loves the piano, which he sees as a versatile and relatively easy instrument that gives you just what you need. Their unique career paths and personal stories exist within the wider shared experience of being composers, which is a nice reminder that there's not one proven path to success. We'll get to that in a bit, but first, an introduction.

Normally when I get a chance to chat with animation professionals, I like to start out by inviting them to revisit their childhood and recall their favorite Saturday morning cartoons and theme songs. Monaco and Evans shared some of their favorites:

Jake Monaco: Definitely DuckTales, [Disney’s Adventures of the] GummiBears, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo … I think that will forever be ingrained in my memory. [The Real] Ghostbusters animated series, I was a big fan of also. It’s a great moment of nostalgia and thinking back to that feeling as a kid, being so excited for Saturday morning and waking up with a bowl of cereal and sitting in front of the TV for two hours.

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Image via Nickelodeon

Sebastian Evans: Actually, I’m working on Ninja Turtles, so that one definitely pops in. Also, G.I. Joe was a huge one, Transformers was a huge one. All of those theme songs pop into my head as I say them. Bionic 6 was a big one of mine. Captain Planet I watched a lot.

And as for what Evans is currently watching:

Evans: My kids are watching Elena of Avalor, and I don’t know who the composer is on it, but it’s awesome! The music on there is really good. Kevin Kiner of [Star Wars] Rebels, he did a really good job, as well. I guess I’m watching Cowboy Bebop with Yôko Kanno, but that’s not new. I always come back to it every year or two. The whole thing is the complete package for me.

Terminology

"Composer" may be an easily recognizable term, but the musical component of the TV and movie-production industry is full of other related jobs. Monaco broke them down for me:

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Monaco: Typically, the composer is hired to write the underscore for the project, whether it be a film, a TV show, commercial, video game … now the list just keeps going on for any kind of media. Of course, it doesn’t only pertain to media; there are other classical composers who are writing music for the sake of writing music and might have a different reason behind it but are not associated with media. From there, the different titles listed on IMDb were dependent on kind of how far along I was working with Christophe [Beck] and what my role was in that respect.

A “score producer” might be the role of sitting at the recording session and helping the musicians really form the piece together, after it’s been written. They’re looking at their sheet music and there’s a lot of great stuff on the sheet music and it’s all there, but then helping the musicians interpret it and making slight adjustments along the way.

Then it goes to the “score mixer” who takes everything and mixes it all together to make the final product sound as great as possible, so, going along and guiding all those steps. And, of course, the main composer is always overseeing everything also and giving final say, but different roles are facets.

Breaking into the Industry

Now that we're clear on what the job entails, you might be wondering how exactly you break into this industry. Unsurprisingly, Monaco and Evans took totally different paths:

Monaco: It wasn’t really on purpose. I started out as a singer/songwriter. I started playing guitar when I was very young and then stopped for a little while, and then picked it back up when I started high school. From there, I started looking into artists like Dave Matthews and Guster and some other kind of more indie rock, jam band type things; I started doing some songwriting from that. Though college I played in bands and I toured around a little bit playing at other colleges up and down the East Coast. And then, after college, I was hanging around Richmond, Virginia for another couple of years and was bartending and still playing gigs, but the rest of the band was kind of ready to settle down and get real jobs and start families and stuff. I was looking for another path, maybe a move to New York or another place. A mentor of mine at the University of Richmond suggested that I take a look at the USC film-scoring program.

So I flew out to L.A. and checked out the program and immediately fell in love with it. I applied to the program and was fortunate enough to get in and then, from there, I started working with another composer [Christophe Beck] and that was like an eight-year mentorship, basically. As my career started to then unfold, I transitioned out of working with them and here I am today.

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Image via Walt Disney Television

Evans: I did a pilot program for Cartoon Network about 12 or 13 years ago. They were doing a program called “Cartoon Monsoon” that was basically an online pilot program. They had mini-episodes, and people would vote on those episodes, and whatever one people voted on, they would make a real pilot for TV. So I did that program, and then a friend of mine, Ciro Nieli, got a chance to do his show, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! And he got me a tryout for that, and I got it. I guess that’s how it started. I did that show, and that was my first TV show, but I got that from all the pilots that I did and showed them. I got the tryout by basically demo’ing the stuff I did for the Cartoon Network pilot program.

I was self-taught. When I saw Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, when I was around 10 years old my dad took me to see that, I did really like the movie but I was in awe of the score, so ever since that moment in that movie where Ackbar goes, “It’s a trap!” and the music gets really big there, I was like, “I want to do whatever that is!” I went and asked my parents for lessons in everything, and from there I was just involved in the music scene throughout.

Evans also shared his early and continuing influences on his music. Lots of these names should sound familiar, but some might surprise you:

Evans: Definitely John Williams. George Gershwin is one, Danny Elfman is a huge one. I’m a big fan of Tchaikovsky. I really love Raymond Scott. These are things I listened to when I was younger, though I still listen to them. [Nobuo] Uematsu, the guy who does the Final Fantasy video game series. Those are the earlier ones, and that’s what I gravitated towards when I started creating music. And that’s when I started taking piano lessons and drum lessons and everything.

Putting in Work

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Composing seems like it could be either very collaborative or very private; it turns out that for each composer, it's a balance between the two:

Monaco: I would say probably, right now, about 50% of my time is in isolation where I’m writing a piece of music. Having said that, it’s really all a collaboration. I’m not just writing a piece of music for myself, I’m getting to look at these animated series that so many people have put so many hours into creating and telling a great story; I’m jumping in to really help communicate that story even further with the music being another character, whether it’s helping comedic beats really pop out, or increasing the level of tension or drama in a specific scene depending on what’s happening.

Evans: Every show is different. Something that’s constant is always trying to execute the vision of the director or producer. Usually, before I start on every episode, I have a meeting with the director, producer, or just one of them, and we kind of go through the episode to see what’s needed: what needs to be enhanced, or if there’s some type of mood or environment that needs to be set up musically, of if you need to draw attention to a character’s point of view, or something like that, in the context of an episode. After that is identified, then everything else falls into place, musically.

As far as the actual nuts and bolts of creating the score, I’m totally by myself; there is no collaboration with anyone. But I do realize that a lot of composers have a team of people; I do not yet have that, but I’ve been advised I should get that quickly. [laughs] But I do spend a lot of time isolated in the studio.

Logistics and Technology

As for the nuts and bolts of what Monaco does as a composer on a daily basis:

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Monaco: I’m opening up a session in the program that I use. I have a template that I’ve established for each of the shows that I work on, so I have a starting point. At least all the instruments are loaded in there. And then a program that runs in tandem with it has video up on the TV. So when I hit play in my program, then the video is also starting to play. I get to pick the starting point of where the piece of music is going to begin and then establish the tempo, whether it’s going to be very slow, or playing very fast, or something in between, something that’s going to get me from Point A to Point B, with Point B being the first hit point that I need to acknowledge in the show. And then I can start composing from there. Usually I’ll have some kind of idea that I’ll put down and then massage it and maybe adjust the tempo a little bit quicker or a little bit slower so that it fits the overall piece of music that I’m trying to write.

Monaco and Evans broke down the typical timelines for various projects that come up:

Monaco: I think for every project it’s a little bit different. For the animated shows, I was brought on, on average, two to three months prior to the first episode being done, so there’s usually a little bit more room for that first episode because you’re really establishing the sound of the show, the tone, and some main themes that are going to be recurring throughout the series. After that, typically it’s one to two weeks per episode from there on out.

For instance, on Dinotrux, it’s kind of on a schedule of every two weeks there’s one episode that’s turned around and it’s ongoing at this point until they decide to end the series. [laughs] But for something like Absolutely Fabulous, they had another composer on for a while and they decided that wasn’t going in the right direction. I got a call and I had, I think, 17 days from the day that I saw the movie for the first time until my music had to be delivered to the stage for their final mix to complete the score. For Keeping Up with the Joneses, I think I had about five weeks to put that together, which again is fairly short for a feature-length film. Typically it’s two to three months. [laughs]

Some other projects, it’s been even longer than that. We had six to nine months when I was working with Christophe for a little while. It’s nice to be brought on so early in a project and to really have time to work more and more with the directors and the producers to work on the score.

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Image via Cartoon Network

Evans: From beginning to end of an episode, at least on my side, which is post-production, I have basically a week and a half to finish everything. That is doing the episode, turning in a rough draft, addressing notes, and then doing the final balanced mix. [laughs] About 10 days, 11 days.

Monaco also talked about balancing what can be a crazy schedule:

Monaco: [Projects] definitely do collide and it can become hectic, but I love working under pressure and I find it very inspiring, like, “Here’s a deadline; just go!” I find that really exciting to do.

TV vs Movies

Both composers have some experience in TV, though Monaco also balances out his work with composing music for feature films. Here's how both composers describe working in each medium:

Monaco: Honestly, I’ve really enjoyed the mix of both of them. Taking the time to develop the sound for a show like Dinotrux or Stinky & Dirty using unique instruments or unique sounds, taking the time to develop that palette was great. From there, it was, now I can use some of this stuff and sprinkle in something new for each episode while maintaining that original palette that was created that the showrunners fell in love with.

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Image via Disney

Being able to go that route is great. On the other side of things, with a feature film, establishing themes at the beginning, and then you kind of just go from beginning to end, and then five weeks later, you’re never touching it again. While it’s a lot of fun it’s also like, “Oh, that project is completely done now.” It’s fun to really get inside of it and see how many different ways you can establish a theme, or re-orchestrate it, or say it in a different way, so to speak.

Evans: It does start with what’s needed. Certain things that change, maybe like an episode that’s more of a horror episode, you might want to take more of the episode in at the beginning and get the ebbs and flows of the episode before you start. But if it’s something that’s in the context of an action episode, that’s heavily action-oriented, you probably just want to build up to those action points. The process is different depending on the episode.

I’ve actually never scored a full-length movie. I do have a couple of credits on movies, but that was just adding tracks that were already created and they just used those tracks. I would imagine though--I’m dying to do a movie, I would love to do a movie—the process would be different, way more subtle. Like, in animation, of course, everything is done big or overblown in order to give it more of a weight to it that you don’t really need with when something has real actors and real faces. So, I guess my process, if I were to do something like a film that’s not animated, would just be more subtle. A more subtle version of what I’m already doing. You really just want to tailor it to the movie and get the original vision that the director had. You only want to add what’s needed if you can. [laughs]

Monaco also shared his experiences on composing for a kids' show versus a feature film aimed at adult audiences:

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Image via Warner Bros. Animation

Monaco: Between Dinotrux and Stinky & Dirty, they’re for a similar audience, although Stinky & Dirty is a little bit more pre-school and they have a more education-based outlook on how they’re trying to put the show together; that’s a big thing that Amazon likes to do, which is excellent. So, the music is kind of telling the kids to pay attention at certain points and helping the audience identity certain key story points. In Stinky & Dirty, when the characters are trying to solve a problem using trash, they’re going to say, “What if…” and there’s an associated signature sound that goes along with every time the characters are saying, “What if we do … “, whatever it might be. Immediately, the kids will hear the associated sound with them asking the question and kind of go from there.

On the flipside, Dinotrux, DreamWorks and Netflix really wanted it to be like HBO for kids and wanted it to feel more cinematic. While there’s definitely more comedic beats throughout the show, there’s the opportunity to write longer pieces of music that have overall arcs that last maybe two to three minutes that cover longer story points, versus something like Stinky & Dirty where we’re focusing on something that’s 10 to 30 seconds, let’s say, until they’re on to their next idea.

Dream Projects and Upcoming Work

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Image via Universal Pictures

Composers are creative people, first and foremost. So of course I had to ask Monaco and Evans what their dream projects would be:

Monaco: I’ve been a fan of the Ghostbusters series since I was a kid, so I think being involved in some sort of iteration of that in the future, now that they’ve done a reboot and everything, I think that would be very dear to me and the nostalgia would really kick in. I would be very open to whatever should come my way. [laughs]

Evans: First and foremost, it would always be Star Wars or something that’s based in space. I’ve been itching to do something like that. I feel like I’m just now ready to tackle something like that. I really want to do some type of HBO-produced series about Crimson Skies, the video game. I’d love to do a series like that, the post-apocalyptic world after the Nazis won the war. Technology has taken a turn and people are still in biplanes; it never progressed to where we’re at now. It’s got a lot of Nikola Tesla-type technology that evolved as opposed to what we have now. I would love to do a project like that. It sounds like it’d be a really good series.

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Image via Cartoon Network

You can also keep up with both of these fantastic composers by taking a look at their current and upcoming projects, which are laid out below:

Monaco: Right now, I’m working on the next season of Dinotrux, which will be Season 4. I think it comes out in the spring. Season 2 of Be Cool, Scooby-Doo is ongoing at this point and will hopefully be showing somewhere by the end of the year. And LEGO Frozen Northern Lights just came out last month, so that was exciting to show on Disney Channel and that’s getting a little bit of buzz.

Evans: I just started on Season 5 of Ninja Turtles and that takes up most of my time. [laughs] It’s very exciting.

Be sure to follow Monaco on Twitter and Facebook, and do the same for Evans on Twitter and Facebook for more from their ongoing composing career!