"Treading Water" Between Hitpoints

Scoring a visual very often means to sync up the music with so called "hit points" - moments where music and a visual/acoustic event from the scene fall together. 

One quite common and rather useful way to work on such a musical cue is to lay out the structure and sketch the important hit points first. Afterwards you would write the musical material that connects these hit points.

There is however a danger in this procedure that can be very often seen and heard with inexperienced composers who follow this strategy which is that they struggle to write something musically meaningful in these "bridges". It very often seems like the music is waiting for the next hit point.

While some scenes might simply not allow to do a lot musically in between, most often there is room for a musical development. It however requires a considerable amount of control to shape the music in a way that it feels like it says something meaningful and yet works towards the next hit point to make it feel like a plausible musical event rather than a superimposed element as can also often be seen and heard (e.g. like a random brass stab somewhere in the bar with the other musical elements ignoring it completely).

It is of course tricky if you laid out the musical gesture of a hit point already to write something that harmonically/melodically/texturally reaches this specific hit point in exactly the right amount of time that you have available in between. Consequentially, a lot of these "bridges" feel like "Ok, I'm harmonically where I need to be for the next hit, but there are 2 more bars to fill, so let me just stall here for a moment". This strategy can work sometimes, but most often it will deflate any energy that you built up already.

So you end up in a textbook case of musically treading water and just "filling time". If you feel like you struggle coming up with something meaningful in these moments, it might be a better choice to actually not lay out the hit points beforehand but only sketching the tempo/bar structure to place all necessary beats or downbeats on the hit points that you want to accent and then write the piece chronologically. While this might create other problems on other ends, it will allow you to follow the flow of the music as it only narrows you down in the dimension of time, but you can still let the music harmonically/texturally or energetically guide you.

This is of course not ideal but might create better solutions than not knowing how to fill the time between musically fixed hit points.

The most important thing as always is to be self critical and aware that these problems might arise. Of course at one point it is important to get the job done so you might not have the time to elaborate on every musical situation but as soon as you feel like you don't move anywhere and just musically wait for time to pass, you should become especially aware whether there is a better way to cover this section.

It also helps to consciously listen to and study film music by the masters to figure out how they develop a cue between hit points or actually create a plausible bridge from one to the other in spite of possible tempo/meter changes. Developing a flexible vocabulary of musical devices that allow you to match a musical gesture to a specific length without losing the integrity of the idea is one of the most essential technical abilities of a film composer and indeed needs a considerable amount of practicing.

If you want to approach this more scientifically, you can even isolate this task and practice it on its own by setting a task like "Write a plausible modulation from G major to Eb major in 6 bars" or "Fill 13 beats between chord X and chord Y" or "Write a build-up towards chord X in 3 bars".