Music and Composers

One of the last touches to your film is the music and film score. You must understand both the long and short term ramifications of how you approach this decision. Sales agents will often tell you to score the film with the most popular songs to make the film sound as similar to a studio and the most commercial possible. However, your film budget will probably not be large enough to buy the rights to the songs so you are putting them in your film with the hope that whoever buys your film will pay for the song rights. This is often a major mistake by filmmakers because buyers will often deduct such a cost from your purchase price. The even worse outcome is that no big studio wants to buy the film and the offers for video assume you own the music rights and then you have to rescore the film with songs your movie budget can afford and hope that the distributors / buyers still want to buy your movie.

My advice is to hire a music composer within your movie budget who can create music that sounds creatively right for your film. It's also a good idea to create a package deal with a music composer that includes all the music and songs in the film. The composer best understands how much everything will cost and will probably be able to get the best deals due to his/her relationships in the music industry. Also, their creative and financial interests are alligned with yours assuming that they care about their career.

You can get a sample film budget at www.quickfilmbudget.com