Do you ever look back on old pictures of yourself? You know that ridiculous hair cut you insisted on in High School which you was adamant was cool at the time… Well… wasn’t?
Well us creative-times feel the exact same way about old projects. Looking back on old projects make you appreciate how you’ve developed yourself yet at the same time cringe at how you willingly did that and release it into the world. I literally have an entire folder on my computer dedicated to all my early stuff I wrote when I was in College/early University which are frankly abysmal. Things that sound ok to the untrained ear, but as many of my creative fellows will agree: you are your own worst critic. Where people hear happy, fun melodies, I hear a cacophony of general MIDI sounds and overly repetitive segments.
But again, I’m one who likes to think that he learns for his experiences. For example this is the very first credited film I wrote the music for and it’s one of those things where I wish I could’ve turned back the clock and did so many things differently. Just just musicology either, but professionally, my attitude and most importantly my standards.
Making the music taught me a lot. Patience for one, dealing with a director who was given the premise that it’s a 10 minute film and asking me to compose to a 15 minute final version, still refusing to grasp that going 50% OVER the allotted time is not fine, especially for television. A second thing this taught me was working to a short deadline, which was due to the production company hiring an external editing company to chop the film down to 10 minutes which I had to rearrange the score to suit. Even now I doubt that this is the televised version as it’s runtime is at 11:34.
Regardless of the niggles I had production wise or technical, it was a funny script and quite enjoyed it. Apart from said Director putting someone else’s name on the IMDB credits when my name is clearly visible at 10:56. Oh well. You live at learn.