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I have written a lot of pieces that I feel would fit nicely for a film or commercial and I would like to practice doing some scoring for films. Rather than filming myself, is there a website made for this kind of thing? One where you can download a sample clip with no soundtrack and can practice creating?

--Edit--

My current method right now has been searching on YouTube for videos that seem dramatic with no music. For example: This speech.

I have a hard time finding similar videos and the quality is usually not very good as you can see when he turns away from the camera the dialog is hard to hear.

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    I have a good idea: turn off the audio track when watching tv or streaming movies. Feb 17, 2020 at 5:40
  • @AlbrechtHügli Yes that is one way I can do that but I still want to have the dialog and other sound effects. right now I just look on YouTube for videos without any soundtrack but those aren't usually good quality. Feb 17, 2020 at 5:58
  • Similar to User Albrecht Hügli's suggestion, you could try movie scripts online, although the timing won't be fixed.
    – user45266
    Feb 18, 2020 at 16:02

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I used to just gate the heck out of the soundtrack whilst trying to keep any useful dialog's head just above the water. Start by hard-cutting all the bits that don't have dialog.
I used to use movie trailers straight from YouTube, rather than try to find bits of full movies I could re-score. You kind of have to pick ones you think you'll get the best separation from, rather than just go for your favourite movie. It leaves the choice rather eclectic & probably more of a musical challenge.
If you mix the dialog low & the score high, you kind of get away with it.

I wasn't hugely successful at this, but it was fun to try -

These days you might get luckier & the soundtrack is in 5.1 - giving you a much simpler way to pull out the centre channel.

Three examples - quite old now, so the videos are pretty low quality; not really important in the overall scheme of things.

This first one had a lot of dialogue, some of which I managed to keep intelligible, some… not so much, but it gets the feel across, which is really all you need.

This one got the same treatment, but had cast singing in one part, so I incorporated that in my score.

This one had a voice-over, no dialog, but was impossible to separate from the original score, so I re-did it myself.

I wouldn't claim any of these were great, but I enjoyed doing them ;)

Another thing you could do is hook up with amateur or student film-makers. Many of them are in need of scoring for their movies - usually shorts - so you can usually knock out the first draft in a day, finalise the next.

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  • That’s great. That is basically what I need. I wonder why there is no site dedicated to this type of thing though. I wish I could make one. What is the easiest way to pull the center channel? Feb 17, 2020 at 9:34
  • If you've got the video track in your DAW, you should have control over all the channels. tbh, my audio rig isn't 5.1 capable & when i did these it wasn't really a concern; I worked from stereo videos, so I've never actually done this from 5.1 - but such as Cubase/Nuendo can extract the audio from the video so you get individual control. Probably Premier/Final Cut Pro could do it too - I re-combined my audio in FCP.
    – Tetsujin
    Feb 17, 2020 at 9:45

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