Danny Elfman Teaches Music for Film – MasterClass

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Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] – I was born in Los Angeles, California. And I lived in an area called Baldwin Hills. And it’s a kind of an odd little area of the city. But it’s an area I really love, because it was around the block from a movie theater called the Baldwin Hills Movie Theater. And that was my church. That’s where I grew up. I was there every weekend of my childhood as I could remember. And the beautiful thing of being in the ’60s is that there were never any parents. It was very much like “The Village of the Damned” if anybody remembers that movie of these kind of children that were all born at the same time because they were implanted from aliens. And there was some kind of evil force. And this was our world. This was our playground. This was our celebration. This is what we did every week. We wanted aliens. We wanted monsters. We wanted mutations. We wanted vampires. This is what we yearned for, or giant robots or things of this nature. So I grew up on movies in Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles, California. You have to understand me getting into music is a freak accident. I didn’t have music in my life as a child. But I became kind of a film nerd early on. And then I think by the time I hit 16, 15, 16, I was really into science in my middle school years. I was a movie fan but science is what I was clearly going to be in my life. I wanted to be a radiation biologist. And I used to do experiments in my room. And I took also radiation biology in summer classes in Los Angeles at the science museum actually. I ended up going to a new school in a new neighborhood. And the friends I met were arty. And they were into music. They were into jazz. One of my friends was actually a trumpet player who was writing contemporary compositions even at 16. He turned me on to “The Rite of Spring” by Stravinsky and then more Stravinsky. And it changed my life. I dumped my record collection. And now I’m obsessed with Russian composers because Stravinsky led to Prokofiev. When I heard Prokofiev, it was an even deeper hit than Stravinsky. Prokofiev got right into my soul. That was like this feels like I’ve heard it all somewhere. I’ve never heard it but it feels like it’s in my blood, which is half Russian. I felt like it was my music. Now I’m 18. Still have never played an instrument. And I’m planning a trip around the world. I wanted to take an instrument with me. I was going to spend a year going through Africa and then over to Asia through India, Nepal, and work my way back to Los Angeles. And my friend Leon Schneiderman, who was later the saxophonist in Oingo Boingo who was already playing saxophone as a kid, but he and I were making this trip together. We plotted it out. But I wanted to bring an instrument and secretly learn something. So I picked the violin. And the reason I picked violin was due to a jazz violinist named Stephane Grappelli. And I said that’s something I would love to try to do. So Leon made this incredible perfec…

Music out of chaos

From The Simpsons theme to the soundtracks of Tim Burton’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and The Nightmare Before Christmas, Danny Elfman’s compositions are original, memorable, and exuberantly weird. Now the Oingo Boingo founder and four-time Oscar nominee shares his unconventional (and uncensored) creative process. Step into Danny’s studio and learn his techniques for evoking emotion and elevating a story through music.

LESSON PLAN

• 01. Introduction
• 02. Beginnings
• 03. Starting Your Score: The Spotting Session
• 04. Storytelling Through Music
• 05. Themes and Melodies
• 06. Real Time Listening: A Simple Plan
• 07. Instrumentation
• 08. Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas
• 09. Workflow1
• 0. Creating Your Template
• 11. Insecurity and Instincts
• 12. Writing Feature Scores
• 13. Changing Your Approach: Milk
• 14. Chasing a Moving Edit
• 15. The Devil’s in the Detail
• 16. Real Time Listening: The Unknown Known
• 17. On Failure
• 18. Working With Directors
• 19. Crossing the Line
• 20. Advice to New Composers
• 21. Closing