Most producers who write to me for the first time don’t ask the question they actually mean. They ask about genre, rate, or availability in March. What they’re really asking is whether I’ll deliver a finished piece of music on schedule, or whether they’ll be improvising in the final mix three days before delivery because a cue never arrived.
Here’s how a project actually runs at my end, from the first call to the delivered file, and what each stage means for your schedule.
Before a single note: spotting
Nothing starts with music. It starts with a screening, or a cut you send over with your own notes, so we can agree where music enters, where it exits, and where it stays out entirely. That’s the spotting session, and it usually takes an hour or two. It costs time up front, and it saves the far more expensive mistake: twelve minutes of score written, three of which actually get used, because nobody had decided in advance.
It’s also where I ask the question composers rarely say out loud: what is this scene saying that the picture alone isn’t saying yet. Music that repeats the image is music you don’t need.
A demo is a decision tool, not a rough draft
Once the brief is set, I deliver one or two demos on the film’s most revealing scenes, not the whole score. A demo isn’t a lesser version of the final cue, it’s there to lock a harmonic direction, a tempo, a texture, before any real production time goes into it. Changing your mind on a demo costs an hour. Changing your mind after an orchestra has already recorded costs a session.
That back and forth is where the real collaboration happens. A director who says “this feels too big for this scene” at the demo stage saves both of us time. The same note after the final mix is expensive for everyone.
Orchestral or electronic: the film decides, not me
I get asked which one I “do,” as if it were a fixed brand. It isn’t mine to settle in advance, it’s the film’s call. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Joanna Arnow’s feature that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Quinzaine des Cinéastes in 2023, needed something intimate and restrained. A larger, more visual project calls for a different texture entirely.
I write in both directions because of where I trained: IMEP (a Berklee Global Partners school) and the Conservatoire de Paris for instrumental writing, and OMEM, my duo with Rémi Kalfon Riou, assistant music director on the Paris 2024 Olympic ceremonies alongside Victor Le Masne, and on Starmania, for hybridizing organic material with electronic texture. The point isn’t that I sell a genre, it’s that I pick the tool the scene actually needs.
The proof the schedule holds: Cannes and after
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed had its world premiere at the Quinzaine des Cinéastes in 2023, followed by its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Centrepiece section, and a competition slot at the Deauville American Film Festival. A festival slot doesn’t move. The screening date is locked months in advance, and the score has to be delivered, mixed, and ready before that date, not roughly before it.
That constraint shapes how I work on every project, not only the ones headed to a festival. A post-production schedule doesn’t forgive approximation, whether it ends in a red carpet or a quiet release.
Working across France and the US
I’m based in Paris and split my work between French and American productions, which in practice means overlapping evenings rather than a full working day in common. That’s manageable when it’s planned for from the spotting session onward, and it’s exactly what a demo phase is for: decisions get made asynchronously, on a piece of music you can both listen to, instead of on a call neither side can fully schedule.
What you actually receive
The final delivery isn’t an MP3 in an email with an apology about the quality. It’s a mixed and mastered file at standard post-production specs (WAV, 48kHz/24-bit at minimum), with separated stems when the sound edit needs to rebalance or re-time an element without a full re-request. Rights and reuse terms get settled before delivery, not after, so nothing gets held up by a question that should have been asked three months earlier.
Listen before you decide
My work is organized by category on the site’s homepage (Film, Advertising, Stage, Catalog), so you don’t have to sort through sixty-one projects to find the five that sound like yours. The 300-track catalog is searchable and filterable by mood directly online, if you want a sense of direction before the first call.
If you’re producing a feature, a series, or an independent project and want to know whether my writing fits what you’re looking for, get in touch. I reply within 48 hours, and for productions that need a more formal negotiation, I’m represented by Time Art.