When I got back from Italy after shooting PADRE PIO, I had 40 hours of footage across two cameras, two weeks of monastery corridors and thousand-year-old streets, and a feeling I couldn't shake. I hadn't opened the timeline yet. I hadn't organized a single clip. But I sat down at my keyboard and started composing.
I didn't wait for a locked picture. I didn't wait for notes from a director — I was the director. I didn't even know what the film was going to be yet, structurally. But I knew what it felt like. The mystery of the man. The weight of those stone corridors at night. The way people in Panni spoke about miracles they'd witnessed firsthand. That feeling needed to become sound before it faded, before the edit started pulling the film in directions I couldn't predict.
That instinct — to score before you cut — breaks every rule in the post-production handbook. And it produced an award-winning soundtrack.
Why I Score My Own Films
Let me be upfront: this is not the standard advice. Most directors hire a composer, hand them a locked picture, and collaborate through revisions. That process works. Some of the best scores in cinema were built that way.
But I came to filmmaking through music. Before I was a cinematographer, before I was an editor, I was a musician. Composing isn't a service I outsource — it's part of how I understand a film. The score and the image are the same language to me, just in different frequencies.
On PADRE PIO, scoring my own film gave me something a hired composer couldn't have: the memory of the shoot. I wasn't scoring footage. I was scoring the experience. The candlelit monastery. The Capuchin friar who guided us through rooms unchanged for centuries. The woman who held Padre Pio's shroud and told us her friend's cancer disappeared. I was there. That presence comes through in the music in a way that watching the dailies never could.
There's a practical reason too. When you're an independent filmmaker running your own production company in Montreal, every dollar counts. Hiring a composer for a feature documentary can easily cost $10,000 to $30,000. Doing it myself — composing, arranging, mixing — means those resources stay in the project for other things. Better lenses. More shoot days. A colorist who actually knows what they're doing.
But the real reason is simpler: I love it. Scoring is where the film finally becomes what it was always supposed to be. Everything before that — the shoot, the edit, the color grade — is preparation for the moment when picture and sound lock together and the thing comes alive.
The Workflow: Picture and Sound in Conversation
Here's how I actually work.
After the shoot, I spend a few days just watching footage. Not editing. Not organizing. Just watching and feeling. I take notes on paper — emotional notes, not technical ones. "This interview needs space underneath it." "The monastery B-roll wants something low and sustained." "The drone shots over Puglia — something that breathes."
Then I write. Usually at night, when the edit suite is quiet and the phone isn't ringing. I work in a DAW — Logic Pro, mostly — with a MIDI keyboard and a library of virtual instruments. Strings, piano, subtle synth pads for texture. I'm not trying to sound like a 60-piece orchestra. I'm trying to find the emotional frequency of the film.
The first pieces I write are rough. Demos, really. I lay them against the raw assembly in DaVinci Resolve and see what happens. Sometimes the music reveals the emotional shape of a scene the visuals haven't found yet. The pacing feels wrong until the music comes in, and suddenly you understand why. Other times the music is completely wrong — it's telling a different story than the footage is telling — and I rewrite. Sometimes I rewrite three or four times before a track fits.
This back-and-forth between the edit and the score is the heart of the process. The edit shapes the score. The score shapes the edit. They push each other forward. By the time I have a locked picture, the score is essentially finished — it grew alongside the film instead of being bolted on at the end.
The final step is the mix. Balancing dialogue, music, and sound design so nothing fights for attention. This is where restraint matters most. A documentary score has to know when to be quiet. The interview is the star. The music is there to support it, not compete with it.
What PADRE PIO Taught Me About Documentary Scoring
PADRE PIO won Best Original Score at multiple festivals. But I don't think it won because the music was technically impressive. I think it won because the music and the picture were inseparable. You couldn't imagine the monastery footage without the low sustained strings underneath it. You couldn't imagine the interviews without the quiet piano that gave them room to breathe.
That's the goal. Not "great music." Great music that belongs to the film so completely that removing it would feel like removing a character.
Here's what I learned:
1. Documentary scoring is about atmosphere, not melody. In a narrative film, a theme can announce a character's entrance or signal a plot turn. Documentary is different. The music is mostly texture — pads, drones, subtle harmonic shifts that create a feeling without demanding attention. On PADRE PIO, the strongest musical moments were the simplest: a single piano note held over a wide shot of the monastery, a low cello line under an interview about miracles. Nothing showy. Everything intentional.
2. Score the emotion, not the information. When an interviewee is explaining historical facts, the music should stay out of the way. When they're describing something personal — a moment of grief, wonder, revelation — that's where the score earns its place. The music doesn't need to underline every beat. It needs to show up when the image alone isn't enough.
3. The silence between notes is as important as the notes. A documentary score that never stops is exhausting. The audience needs room to breathe. On PADRE PIO, some of the most powerful scenes have no music at all — just the voice of the subject and the ambient sound of the location. The silence makes the music more effective when it returns.
4. Write what the location felt like, not what it looked like. The monastery at night wasn't visually busy — candlelight, stone walls, shadows. But it felt enormous. Ancient. Heavy with history. The score had to capture that weight without being heavy-handed. A few sustained low strings, a subtle organ pad, and let the silence do the rest.
I carried these lessons into LAND OF THORNS, which tells the story of a WWII massacre through interviews with survivors and historians. The score there had a different emotional register — more tension, more unease, more historical gravity — but the principles were the same. Atmosphere over melody. Emotion over information. Silence as a musical choice.
Should You Score Your Own Documentary?
Probably not. I mean that honestly.
Most directors should hire a composer. Scoring is a specialized skill that takes years to develop, and doing it badly hurts the film more than doing it yourself helps your budget. If you don't have a musical background, if you don't understand arrangement and mixing, if the idea of opening a DAW makes you anxious — hire someone. A good composer is worth every dollar.
But if music is already part of who you are as a filmmaker — if you came up through music the way I did, if scoring feels like an extension of the edit rather than a separate discipline — then do it. Own it. Make it part of your voice.
The score for PADRE PIO wouldn't exist if I had handed the film to someone else. It came from being in those rooms, hearing those stories, feeling the weight of that monastery at night. A composer watching the footage could have written something similar. They couldn't have written that.
At Skypan Pictures, we offer original film scoring as part of our full-service post-production — composing, arranging, and mixing, all done in-house in Montreal. If you're producing a documentary and want a score that feels inseparable from the picture, I'd love to talk.
Contact Skypan Pictures to discuss your project's score.
— Michael Franceschini, CSC Associate Cinematographer
