How to commission music for your short film

A short film is where most directors commission music for the first time, and almost nothing about it is obvious. Nobody tells you when to start, what drives the price, what you are allowed to do with the result, or which piece of paperwork a festival will ask for three days before the deadline. So the default happens: a library track gets dropped over the edit in the last week, and it is fine, and the film is slightly less than it was going to be.

None of this is difficult. It is just never explained.

Start earlier than feels sensible

The single biggest mistake is treating music as post. By the time a picture is locked, every decision that music could have influenced has already been made: how long a scene runs, where a cut falls, whether a moment breathes or hurries. A composer brought in at the rough cut can tell you that a scene needs four more seconds to let a theme land, and at that point four seconds is free.

You do not need a locked picture to start a conversation. A script, a treatment or a rough assembly is enough to talk about what the film should sound like, and that conversation costs nothing.

Original or library: an honest comparison

Library music is genuinely the right answer sometimes. Use it when:

• The music sits under dialogue and is essentially texture.
• The film is a calling card and the budget is truly zero.
• You need it this week and there is no time for anything else.

Original music earns its cost when:

• A theme needs to return and mean something different the second time. Library tracks cannot develop.
• The music has to hit a specific frame - a look, a door, a cut. Library tracks are written to no picture in particular and never quite land.
• The film has a tone that is not a genre. Library catalogues are organised by mood keywords, and "melancholy but hopeful, with something slightly wrong underneath" is not one of them.
• You are going to festivals and want the film to sound like itself rather than like the four other shorts in the same block.

What actually drives the cost

Nobody can quote a score without seeing the film, but the things that move the number are not mysterious. In rough order of impact:

• Minutes of music, not minutes of film. A twenty-minute short with three minutes of music is a small job. The same short wall-to-wall is not.
• How many players. Solo piano is one afternoon. A string quartet is four musicians, four diaries and four rooms - unless the composer plays the parts, which is the whole reason that arrangement exists.
• Played or programmed. Sampled strings cost time; real strings cost time and people.
• How locked the picture is. Re-timing a cue because the edit changed is not a revision, it is a second pass. This is where short film budgets actually die.
• Whether one person does the music and the mix. Two suppliers means two briefings, and the note you gave the composer has to survive being relayed to the mixer.

Who owns it, and the paperwork nobody mentions

This is the section most guides skip and it is the one that costs people festival slots. Agree three things in writing before anyone starts, even if it is only an email:

• What you are licensed to do with the music. Festivals only, or broadcast and streaming too? Territory and duration? A score written for a festival run and then sold to a distributor is a renegotiation nobody planned for.
• Who holds the copyright. Usually the composer keeps authorship and grants you the rights you need, which is normal and fine - but you need to know which it is.
• A cue sheet. A list of every piece of music in the film with its composer, publisher and exact duration. Festivals and broadcasters ask for it, always at the worst moment, and it is trivial to produce while the session is open and tedious to reconstruct a year later.

What to send when you make contact

• The cut as it stands, however rough, with a timecode burn-in.
• Two or three films or cues that feel like the right tone - and one line on why, because "like this" is ambiguous and "like this, but warmer and with fewer strings" is not.
• Where you think music should go, and more usefully where you think it should not.
• Your actual deadline and your actual budget. Both save everyone a week.

The hand-off nobody plans for

One last thing, because it catches almost everyone. The composer writes the music and the mixer decides how loud it is, and those are usually two different people who never speak. The note you gave in the edit suite - that the theme should feel like it is arriving from somewhere else - reaches the composer and then stops. What gets delivered is stems, and what the audience hears is somebody else's interpretation of them.

On a feature with a proper post schedule there is time to fix that. On a short there is not. It is worth asking anyone you approach how the music gets from their session into the final mix, and who is in the room when it does.

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