This is a sum up of emails I recently wrote concerning the music score of Valkaama.

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- Valkaama can have several music scores since we have the technical opportunities (welcome to the Internet age) and Valkaama is a free project.

- If you want to contribute music I would recommend that you start from the current Alpha version of the movie. The scenes themselves won’t change much. What may happen is that additional material will be included to connect the dialogue scenes. In that case the music between two scenes will have to become a bit longer. Major changes will only take place within the last 3-4 scenes.

- If you are a member of a royalities collecting society, make sure that your contract allows you to license your work yourself, i.e. the respective collecting society doesn't own the exclusive rights to all of your work (this is the case for instance with Germany's GEMA). If the latter is the case a collaboration might only be possible in a limited way.

- Concerning the music score a melancholic theme would work out best but I am not going to interfere by saying "that works", "that doesn’t work". So you can pretty much compose the score the way you see it best from your artistic point of view. There is only one thing to consider: If the music absolutely doesn’t suit the movie (i.e. children’s songs recorded in the kindergarten nearby) I won’t support the music score on the webpage. BUT: Great thing is, you can still produce a music score like that and you can even distribute the movie with it. After all, Valkaama is an Open Source Movie.

- If you want to make a whole music score on your own, just drop me a message so that I know about. If you want my opinion, I’d be happy to receive examples from time to time.

- If you want to contribute only to a few scenes, then please drop me message so I can make sure that there won’t be scenes with 5 different music scores and scenes without any music at all...

- I highly encourage you to work together with other people who want to contribute music to Valkaama (for email addresses please email me). There might be a lot of synergies.

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Hello

I would love to try my hand at writing a piece of music for one of the scenes. It would be my first attempt and therefore I would appreciate your advice. Maybe you could suggest a short scene that I might attempt. You might also advise me not to try. Examples of my work can be heard on [audioscapist.net]

Many thanks, Patrick Fitzsimons.

Hi Patrick,

If you would like to write a piece of music for one or more scenes, you are very much welcome to do so. I have been listening to your music and I do not see/hear any reason why you shouldn't try it As for the recommendation of a short scene it's difficult to say... You can choose one you like

Well, ok. Something short which comes to my mind would be Scene 13b or Scene 14b. You can download them seperately from our postproduction server under the following address: [valkaama.digitmedia.de] .

Please keep me updated about your composition. If you want to, we can release the scene with your music here and/or on our YouTube channel after it's ready.

Tim

Hi Tim

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a go.

Cheers, Patrick.

Hi Tim

I have sketched out an idea for scene 14a - now that I have re-read your email I notice that you suggested 14b (I am an idiot) - still I would be interested to know what you think. Is it possible to upload or send it you somehow? I am going to try the scenes you actually suggested to.

Cheers, Patrick.

Hi Patrick,

If you want to send me sth there are several ways. At the moment we are exchanging big chunks of data via our FTP server. But this one is not for public upload so I would have to give you the login data. Easiest would be to send files via email (see: [www.valkaama.com]) if they don't exceed 50 mb. If you want to send more data Skype would be a solution (it is possible to diretly send files via Skype) and also you could upload them to a filehoster like [www.speedshare.org] or [www.rapidshare.com] and publish the download link here.

Maybe you can just export the music track in order to reduce the amount of data significantly.

I also look forward to all the footage.