The classes went as follows - people only had to go to one of the two classes, but a few turned up to both which was nice:

The scene where Clint Eastwood fires the canon at Tuco leading into the 'Ecstasy of Gold' sequence from Morricone/Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was used to introduce the power of music in the first class. The idea was - introduce the power of music to relate character and move the plot along in a way which made what could have been a generic scene (someone looking for a gravestone) into the highlight of the film.

We then - at the Film School's request - looked over my short film The Highwayman in both classes. We talked about the theme-and-variations approach which guided the temp track, what governed our sound design choices, and how I'd been working with a composer to better score the film's ideas.

Shifting to the power of music to describe character, I played the Main Title of Patton (Goldsmith), and from listening to the music without any vision as a class we tried to construct a portrait of what kind of person this music was describing. I showed them a scene where I though Goldsmith had beautifully supported the idea that Patton thought he was the reincarnation of previous military leaders.

Looking at the power of music to score a more abstract notion of character, we looked at a scene where Cliff Martinez's score to Soderbergh's Solaris is crucial to understanding that the planet Solaris is a character in the film, and is probing the mind of George Clooney's character. As a music only sequence, sound design was not really commented on here.

Coming to The Thin Red Line (Zimmer), we looked at how the 'Journey to the Line' sequence on film (not to be confused with the CD track called 'Journey to the Line' ) featured sound and music playing a powerful organisational role in taking us in and out of the minds of the many men of Charlie Company as they move from the beaches of Guadalcanal inland and closer to the battlefield. This one prompted a lot of discussion.

Looking at the potential of music to suggest the thought process of a character, we came to David Raksin's Laura. I showed the scene where Gene Tierney's character is introduced to the 'theme of Laura' and how effective diegetic music could be in supporting character throughout a film. We then looked at the film's great musical scene - where it is revealed that Gene Tierney's character is obsessed with Laura as he moves around her apartment and her theme sounds as he tries to feel her presence via her effects.

We closed with the opening sequence of Morricone/Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, looking at the way music was strategically used, how Morricone scored character in the film, and how bare sound design was used to construct suspense.

The second class started with the same example that ended the first - watching it again we started to draw out the layers of the scene and how Leone was playing with his audience.

We then went to the scene which introduced Jill from Once Upon a Time in the West (Morricone), looking at how Morricone and Leone were telling us from this character's introduction that she was the kind of person who lay at the foundation of the American frontier spirit, while all the men were characterised by dissonance and unstable melodies.

The evening class also looked at The Highwayman again, and we talked about the influence of voice-casting and its power to affect a film. I also included a little accident that had happened when I'd put my composer's end title sequence to the film over the 'get thee to a nunnery' scene from Hamlet. The music - five cue changes of which matched up to movements in the scene - was an effective demonstration of the power of music to change the character of a scene. Shakespeare became an Ealing comedy.

Turning to a case where pre-recorded music was used powerfully, we looked at Kubrick's 2001. I argued that Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Lygeti and Khatchaturian pieces were rare cases where the temp track of the film was elegantly constructed and so appropriate even on a composition-level to the ideas of the film that it was a good thing to show to anyone who wanted to use classical or pop music in their films - if you could use it this well, then maybe you don't need someone to compose music for your film. I also explained how Kubrick had experimented with alternative scores (two of them - North and Cordell), and looked at the main title sequence, the first appearance of the monolith and subsequent discovery of the killing power of the bone, and Dave Bowman's encounter with the monolith, subsequent journey and celestial imprisonment. In each case, Zarathustra arose with tonal clarity out of the polyphonic chaos of Lygeti's requiem to show how the alignment of celestial bodies prompted man forward to an evolutionary breakthrough.

We looked at the main title and opening sequence of Hitchcock/Herrmann's Vertigo as an example of how Herrmann placed the idea of 'vertigo in life and love' at the foundation of James Stewart's character, and how this creative process had produced a score which successfully evoked vertigo in its audience - noone came hum the opening title because it is polyphonic in construction - neither up or down.

Philippe Sarde's The Tenant for the Polanski film closed out the piece, looking at the first scored scene of the film, where Trelkovsky's fascination with death begins.

Both classes closed with the injuction - think about the potential of music and sound in pre-production. The best results come from career collaborations, careful planning, and experimentation. And scripted use of sound. People can close their eyes easily but their ears are always open. This is the subversive power of sound in cinema - that people think they are watching a movie, but they're listening to one as well, and the manipulation of their viewing experience is cheaper, more experimental, and versatile through sound than picture.

Other examples I'd prepared and didn't use: In the Mood for Love/ 2046 (Umebayashi/Wong Kar Wai / Galasso), The Age of Innocence (Bernstein), The Piano (Nyman/Campion), Planet of the Apes (Schaeffner/Goldsmith). If I could have had a print of Birth there, I might have used that too.