One of the questions from fans at the end was “when is the Orville movie coming out?” To which Seth laughed & said, “one step at a time, we gotta do Season 3 first!” Chances are he meant we gotta get season 3 first but I’m foolishly hopeful that it’s good news.



It was a good panel. Showed clips from the show then talked to the composers about it. Their styles & inspirations & how lucky they are that Seth lets them be.

A few of takeaways:

- the two part episodes had different composers due to time & schedule. But they ended up sounding similar by accident. The two never had time to talk to each other about it

- except for the pilot they aren’t really able to get thematic excerpts from each other. So they mostly reuse the Orville theme & don’t have individual character themes

- Fox wasn’t big on the idea of live musicians but Seth wore them down once they realized how big of a deal it was to him.

- After seeing the clip of Isaac returning from his 700 years on the planet Seth joked about how they got a bigger budget for costumes in season 2.

- the composers love how Seth lets them do their own thing & take advantage of ship shots, etc. “It’s nice to be able to write melodies again & not just atmospheric music” one of the composers said

- except for Andrew (who Seth met during his singing albums) the other composers were film score heroes to Seth (used to collect film score albums in college) who was surprised they said yes when he asked if they wanted the job. Andrew technically didn’t have the experience but Seth knew that “if you can write you can write” (like they have one script writer on the show from Friday Night Lights who had never done sci-fi before but he said she knocks it out of the park every time) & knew the guy was good. So while it was a leap of faith it was only a tiny one.

- one question from the audience was if Ron Jones was ever considered. While Seth sung Ron’s praises he really didn’t answer that question but instead said how composers are cast like actors are cast for a show.

- Andrew occasionally works without a click track. He’ll use it for action scenes where music has to hit but for other moments he’ll free conduct during the record so the music can feel & flow with the scene better

- the composers have to compose without any of the FX due to schedule. So most of the time they’ll see the characters reacting to something out the window of the ship as the actor staring at a green screen. The scoring stage is the first time they see any visual effects - though only about 75% of the way done. It’s often a “ahhhh” moment to see how their guessing works in conjunction. So far it’s been rare that their swells & hits are late due to guessing but it happens. But it can be fixed.

- scoring session times vary widely due to the amount of music in each episode being different. Also type of music (conversation Vs action) can change the length as well.

- (slight spoiler) the last episode of this season has some intense music in it. It was one of the longest scoring sessions, not because of any mistakes while playing, but because of how much of it there was

- a lot of the cinematic moments with music on the show are thanks to Fox allowing them to have a longer show with fewer commercial breaks. Normally those would have to be trimmed or cut for time but they get to have “shoe leather.”

- on this show they (especially Andrew) try to dip the music themselves for dialogue instead of having the mixer do it. Any brass will drop out & woodwinds will take over. It’s a pet peeve of Andrew to hear when the mix drops instead of the music doing so naturally so they try to do that

- Don’t make fun of the projectionist & the 20 second delay (of the theatre not the show)

- to get approved Bruce sent over the theme song as a piano only track (instead of an orchestral computerized mock-up). They figured that if the piano alone could sell the piece then they truly had something memorable.

- the theme song came first then the FX, animators & editors did their thing to time everything like the final engines to the music. Usually it’s the other way around

- the theme changes keys & moves around the keyboard a lot to symbolize the ship exploring & moving around space.

- they only discussed season 1 music since that’s what was on the CD

- Seth wasn’t happy that Fox puts a blanket compressor on the audio tracks for broadcast since it changes the sound of the music but it’s what they do for every show on the network as a rule. If you want to hear the real untouched sound for an episode watch it on Hulu or AppleTV. (Or buy the La La Land Records CD!)

- I didn’t get an autograph since I didn’t pay for the higher up ticket. I brought my CD from home anyway hoping maybe I could get one but no. They had it separated

- when composing for the “flatland” scene the composer didn’t know what it would look like due to lack of visual FX. And at the time Seth didn’t know either to tell him because it hasn’t been decided yet. So sometimes the composers have to rely & guess from the script since they can’t always see or know what it will look like.