Sintel, scored

The film is scored from the first frame to the last, and the scored video, printmaster and music-and-effects stem are in the studio. The clip had no audio track at all, so the orchestra is its whole soundtrack: there was no dialogue to duck under and no old music to remove. The delivery measures −16 LUFS for web, true peak −1.7 dB.

The score, in E minor, played by a full orchestra in a hall:

• 1M1 "The Lair" (0:00–0:31): the dread. In the dark there's only a low E in the basses and cellos, with cold celesta notes for the crystals. When the dragon is revealed (0:07), timpani and bass drum strike and the low strings crawl through the dragon motif, E–F–E–B♭, which ends on an uneasy tritone. High violins hang a minor ninth apart above it. When she's face to face with the dragon, the horns play a soft first hint of her theme. The baby dragon at 0:26 gets a harp-and-celesta figure. A timpani crescendo then leads straight into the attack.
• 1M2 "The Fight" (0:31–1:03): it explodes. Driving cellos and arpeggiating violins push it, with stabs on the cuts at 0:33 and 0:39. Four horns take her heroic theme. When she lands on the dragon at 0:50, the theme comes back at full force: trumpets join the horns, violins double it an octave up, and cymbals and timpani land the hit. When she's thrown down at 0:59 the whole orchestra hits a jarring chord. A timpani roll then swells into her last charge.
• 1M3 "Aftermath" (1:03–1:30): quiet and unresolved. It opens at the climax: the theme broadens in the brass, with the big timpani and cymbal strokes the brief asked for. Then it collapses at the cut at 1:15. Under a low C, the high violins hang on and the celesta and harp return. The solo horn plays the theme one last time and stops on F♯. Below it the bass clarinet murmurs the dragon motif, and the music fades out without resolving.

What came back imperfect:

• 1M1 low basses: the checker heard 4 of 6 notes in the low E pedal. A re-render measured worse, so I kept the original section take.
• 1M2 bass drum: the first take added strokes I hadn't written, so I replaced it with a one-shot drum that plays exactly the 7 hits written.
• 1M3 high violins: the checker heard 5 of 8 attacks. They're very high, quiet held notes that are hard for it to read, so I didn't re-render them. Listen to that last stretch.
• Overlaps: each cue's hall reverb tail runs about 2–3 seconds into the next cue. They overlap smoothly, and the final loudness pass keeps the overlaps within the peak limit.