The "Lucky Punch" Project

When I got into music university at the age of 20, I was already working on smaller scoring projects for a few years. Student films, amateur films, you name it. I didn't earn any money with those but I felt that "I was climbing up the ladder". I felt that I was "ready for the big game" and looking at all the A list composer biographies, I thought that I just needed one big project that would kickstart my career.

One year later, I actually got a phone call by a director/producer who heard my music in an amateur movie and wanted to hire me for his medium budget but very ambitious feature film with enough budget to record an orchestra.

Besides this project being engrained into my brain with the most cringy professional memories (I literally had a meeting with the director in my room at my parent's house (where I still lived back then) in a rural village in the middle of nowhere in East Germany to talk about the project, sitting at my "workplace" (a computer next to my bed), "syncing" the music to the movie by taking timing notes on a tiny TV with a VCR etc.) I remember that I felt that THIS was the one project that would start my career. I was aware back then already that this project was way above my profile and I really couldn't mess this up. So I acted as professional as I could back then, hiding the fact that I was thrown into cold water and barely could keep my head above the water line.

I remember not sleeping for several nights before the orchestra recording sessions and I remember the looks of the musicians when I walked through the recording stage.

Yet, somehow with a lot of luck, I managed to get this project past the finish line with everybody being reasonably happy as far as I remember.

I thought this must be it. I just recorded with a real orchestra, that must have put me into a new league of composers. I felt that I just needed to lean back and wait a few weeks after this before the next big profile projects would come in.

The movie got conceptually altered heavily which resulted in most of my score being taken out of the movie and only left in for the grand scale moments. The score was replaced in most places with a minimal, synth oriented underscore by another composer. Of course, if I had more experience back then, I would have stated right from the beginning that the movie doesn't need an orchestral score in most places but I of course was way too excited to record an orchestra and also felt that "any" movie should be scored with an orchestra because that was what John Williams was doing, right?

So the release of the movie got delayed actually for quite some time and even after release, it really didn't have any success and didn't become a big hit. In fact it failed miserably.

But I was still sure that now some other big shot directors must have seen it and heard my music and noticed that it was a real orchestra and contact me for their job and it must be only a matter of weeks before my phone would start to ring.

But nothing happened. It was as if I was back at the same level that I was before the movie, getting asked for no budget amateur movies and I was of course reasonably dissappointed.

It took more than one year until there was a slightly noticeable effect of that movie. The composer who got hired to rescore it hired me as an orchestrator for his next score which started a phase of a few years of collaboration with him on several projects that of course pushed my career forward. But all this happened over several years.

Instead of rocket launching my career, this one movie basically just was a little nudge into the professional world.

Why am I telling this story? Because I know that there are a lot of young composers who are just like I was back then, waiting for the lucky punch project. The spotlight of attention very quickly focuses on such stories. A great example for a lucky punch is the career of Lucas Vidal but the thousand of composers slowly climbing up the ladder step by step of course make a less exciting story to tell.

But this is the norm. A career in composing is a long and often slow road and career trajectories are usually very steady with only a few unexptected peaks. The good thing is that this rule also applies in the other direction. Once you have built up a reputation and a steady stream of projects, it is highly unlikely that your career suddenly falls apart completely (unless you make a catastrophic business decision), but at the same time it is very unlikely that there will be this one project that out of the blue catapults you into the stratosphere. John Williams didn't score Star Wars out of the blue. He was busy and hard working in the industry for more than 20 years before that, he even won two Oscars before Star Wars. Hans Zimmer didn't suddenly get to where he is but by staying on a persistent upwards trajectory. 

Of course a certain amount of luck is involved as sometimes projects become a sudden hit (see Star Wars), dragging the career of everybody involved in this movie to a higher level. This is of course also the reason why there are many composers who never make it to the absolute top. For instance, I would easily consider Bruce Broughton technically and musically at a similar level as John Williams but he unfortunately never had the massive breakthrough that made him a clear A list composer.

For a career as a composer it is essential to understand that this is a marathon and you need to constantly be working on it. The instances of career shortcuts in this field are incredibly few and you should definitely not expect them to happen. Personally, I'm nowhere near where I would like to be with my career, yet I see a constant upward trajectory that is slowly taking me up the ladder. 

It now has been more than 15 years since the project that I was talking about at the beginning and it didn't cause immediate gains and the consequences of it were far smaller than I expected them to be at the time. However, looking back it definitely paved the way for more projects with real orchestra and shaped my personal work profile towards this direction.