There's War, and There's War in Space: 'Guardians of The Galaxy' Orchestrator Timothy Williams Discusses Tone and Palette with Music Times

War is hell. But sometimes Hollywood would prefer if it sounded a little more upbeat than that.

Such is the challenge faced by composers and orchestrators when drafting the scores for conceptually similar films: What's the audible difference between various alien races carrying out warfare on Xandar, a la Guardians of The Galaxy, and alien races aiming to eliminate human life on Earth, such as in The Day The Earth Stood Still?

"It's the way you write, it's the the types of instruments that you use—you decide on your palette—and all of that comes down to one of the hardest things in film, which is tone," says Timothy Williams, the orchestrator for both of the aforementioned film scores. "That's the thing that I usually spend the most time discussing with directors."

Orchestrators, the often unsung heroes of cinema scores, ultimately handle the responsibility for that tone. Williams—a composer himself—was charged with taking the Tyler Bates' composition for Guardians and setting that to an orchestra. A modern composer typically writes a score and then creates a demo using brass pads and string pads to create a rough draft for the orchestrator, who then works as a pre-production producer—determining volumes and instrumental emphasis to best suit the assigned tone.

"(Composers) have a particular sound for a film...if it's a very suspenseful film that needs to creep around, it's going to be very different orchestration than a superhero film where there's a lot of heroic moments and some comedy," he explains. "With the Guardians it's a very fun film, so I didn't have as many low woodwinds this time, I weighted the violins and we had more trumpets than usual. The register moved up to accommodate the tone of the film."