Film Scoring 101: Cue Numbering

Welcome to the first post in a sporadic series on Film Scoring Basics, in which I will help get filmmakers and upcoming composers new to the scoring process up to speed on general introductory topics.Today I'm going to discuss how we come up with cue numbers.A typical cue number will look something like 3m14, and there are three parts to it.Reel number - music - Cue number.

1. Reel number

Back in the good old days people used something called "film" (Google it), and because a single film reel couldn't hold an entire 2 hour movie, it had to be broken down into multiple reels. Nowadays I usually get the film as one long quicktime file, and so theoretically every cue would start with 1. But I've found that by breaking the film into hypothetical reels, it helps you group cues together.Consider this list of cues: 1m1, 1m2, 1m3, 1m4, 1m5, 1m6, 1m7, 1m8, 1m9, 1m10, 1m11And this list: 1m1, 1m2, 1m3, 2m1, 2m2, 2m3, 3m1, 3m2, 3m3, 4m1, 4m2It may not look like a bug deal, but on a film with 40+ cues every little thing you can do to help make things more organized and easier to look at matters.I typically break the film into 20 minute "reels", although the number is arbitrary. It could be 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, it really doesn't matter. But what it means for me is that any cue that starts from 1:00:00:00 to 1:19:59:23 is considered Reel 1, any cue that starts from 1:20:00:00 to 1:39:59:24 is Reel 2, and so on.

2. m

The "m" in 1m1 simply stands for music. It's a way of separating the reel number form the cue number.

3. Cue Number

Also pretty straightforward, this is the cue in order according to its reel. 1m1 comes before 1m2 which comes before 1m3. Not too tricky.Sometimes while in the midst of scoring you might realize that you need a cue that you initially hadn't wanted. Perhaps at the spotting session you and the director agreed that the scene was better without music, but now that they've heard your kick-ass score they realize they need more of it!Whatever the reason, if you are in the middle of scoring it can be a really bad idea to renumber every cue in the film. If you've already had three versions of 2m6 floating around and all of a sudden you change it to 2m7, you are just asking for trouble. The better solution is to either use .5, or a lowercase letter.So if you realize you need a cue between 1m1 and 1m2, you either label it 1m1.5 or 1m1b. Personally I prefer 1m1b because it's a little cleaner looking, but either will work.

Titles

People love to get clever with titles, using inside jokes for the film or just silly pieces of dialogue. I think that stuff is great for the soundtrack, but I find it much more practical to make the title as clear as possible.When you are looking at a list of 30 cues and you want to open the folder for the airplane jump, do you think it is easier to find "The Airplane Jump" or "Having a Bad Day"?Know what your cue is first, save the clever titles for later.

Conclusion

And that's pretty much all there is to it, not very complicated but important to have a handle on.