Vivian Aguiar-Buff on Hans Zimmer, DreamWorks, and Her Emmy Win

Do you remember the first film that made you want to focus on the music of movies rather than movies themselves?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: I had been a pianist since I was five years old, and so music has always been a part of my life. When I started working as an assistant director on set, I missed music so much, so I started DJing at night and producing my own music, trying to play songs and tracks from other DJs, but I would also produce my own. That’s how I got into producing music, composing, and all of that. I think my passion for all film and for being a filmmaker was just natural. When I decided to go into music, I didn’t think of anything else but film scoring because I needed film to be part of my life as much as I needed music to be part of my life. I think it was just a combination of two things.

It’s harder to say one movie or even one composer who made me want to get into this line of work, because when you talk about film composers—John Williams, Hans Zimmer, and all those huge names—I’m in love with all of it. I love Atticus Ross and Nine Inch Nails, and I love electronic music. I’m in love with all of it!

Talk to me a little bit about electronic music in your own work. One of the biggest credits you have is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is a sequel that’s known for taking the previous film’s Alan Silvestri soundtrack and bringing it more into a contemporary, electronic realm. What was that experience like?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a culmination of my electronic side. When I graduated from Berklee in Film Scoring and Composition with a minor in Conducting, I moved to LA, knowing no one. Berklee was such an important part [of me getting started in Hollywood], and they had an office in LA and they really helped me to get situated, and with contacts, and get to know the people who were actively working.

When I moved out to LA, through Berklee, I got my résumé sent to Remote Control Productions. I was like, “Oh my God, this is Hans Zimmer. It is going to be great! I’ll never get it, but it’s fine.” Just going in and having an interview with him was going to be awesome. So I interviewed first with Ramin Djawadi (Berklee, Class of ’98) and didn’t get the gig. Then I interviewed with Hans’s sampling department and did not get the gig, but apparently they liked me because my résumé kept getting passed around.

I finally got a job with Henry Jackman, who composed the music for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I already produced electronic music, and I knew how to work with synths. I did a little of this at Berklee, but it was in the very beginning of the Electronic Production and Design classes.

When I started working with Henry—he is this huge orchestral composer—he would write for the orchestra and leave at 6 PM and he would be like, “Hey, just program some electronic drums. Let’s see what you can do.”

So I would stay overnight while he was not sitting on his rig, just programming drums and modulating synths. He has a huge analog synth wall and that was my “in,” really. If it weren’t for electronic music and me doing all of that, I don’t think I would have gotten that far, just as far as sitting down and actually producing things to go onscreen. So that was my first huge experience.

This is what I tell my students all the time: There are a thousand people who can be amazing orchestral composers and arrangers, but I think you have to have a secret sauce. What’s different and unique about you? Do you play the trombone? If you are an amazing singer, why don’t you sing on your scores? You always have to have something different. For me, electronic music was it.

When Henry Jackman would come in the next day, after you’d spent all night toiling, would he have extensive feedback for you? Or would he just say, “Oh, this is great!”?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: No! [Laughs] It was never great! [Laughs]. No, as great as it was, he’d always have feedback. At the beginning of your career, you’re always going to be an additional writer. And I wasn’t even that. I was just a technical assistant, writing on his things. So you have to write with someone else’s brain, and so there’s always criticism. There are always 10 versions of the same cue, and you have to be so accepting. You have to leave your ego at the door and be willing to change, and I think that’s how we grow. Of course there are geniuses who come in ready, but that’s one in a million. Most of us are just learning through other people’s craft, and I think you have to be willing to go through that so you can grow as an artist too.

And on the rare occasions when he did just say, “Great,” I was like, “Give me some constructive criticism! I need that so I can go from here to there.”

Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the second Captain America film, and Alana Silvestri (who composed the music for Captain America: The First Avenger) is one of the greats. How do you top that? But I think Henry Jackman made it happen through electronic music. He was a pop producer before he started going into film scoring. He produced Seal! He produced a lot of pop artists, and I think that’s his secret sauce.

When you take on film work, especially when it’s a franchise, you probably have to be intimately familiar with everything that came before the current movie. Tell me about your experience with that, either as a composer or in your role as music director and music supervisor at DreamWorks Animation.

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: I think knowing the previous work of any franchise is essential because we have to be respectful of the work that has been done before. When you have a franchise, you have an intellectual property that worked, and so the success of that is in the colors, the music, the dialogue, the characters—It becomes a franchise because people are just in love with those characters! It’s also in the writing. Is it funny? Is it scary? So it’s something very specific and that has to live on. That’s not to say that it can’t be a complete departure, like say after three movies, the franchise is stale, then how do we reinvent it? In order to reinvent it, you have to deeply understand what happened before so you can completely depart from there, and it’s an evolution, not just something completely different.

It’s history: These franchises are so special. And there are so many cooks in the kitchen, too. You have to be able to back your ideas and sell them properly. You need to understand exactly what was done before and the pathos and all of that. So it’s central.

What was your first experience with the number of people involved in the film and realizing that you were part of something greater?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: Before I went into film scoring, I always knew how big the teams were. I worked at a studio and I’m a team player. That’s one of the reasons why I went into music supervision and left composing, because when I was writing, I was just in a dark room by myself and feeling lonely, and I like to trade ideas with people. I think we’re so much more creative that way.

I always knew how big the teams were, but I never knew how intense the back-and-forth was until I stepped into DreamWorks, because of the franchises and because of the brand. It’s something so solid, and it has such a voice, specific design, and music.

It’s a brand, and so to be able to do anything with a brand that size—we’re talking about Kung Fu Panda or Trolls or How to Train Your Dragon. And now we have been acquired by NBC Universal, so it’s an even bigger team. We deal not only with DreamWorks but with the Universal brand. So you have the Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous series that comes from Jurassic World. And then we have to respect John Williams, Steven Spielberg, and Amblin. It’s not just DreamWorks, it’s all of DreamWorks, Universal, and Amblin. And there are so many people! That’s why these things are as big as they are, because there’s so much thought put into it. And so every single decision is discussed in so many ways and for so long that I think that’s really what makes it so special.

How do you prepare your students for working with teams of that size?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: First of all, I try to explain filmmaking hierarchy: Who is our producer? Who is our executive producer? What’s the difference between a line producer and an executive producer? What’s a director role in a movie vs. a director role in a series? How big is the production team? What are the various stages of production: development, pre-production, production, and post-production?

I try to really explain the studio hierarchy within the corporate structure because these huge studios are corporate, essentially, especially after Universal acquired us.

We were small! It’s funny to say that DreamWorks is a small production company, but that’s really what it is, and then to be put in this huge corporate machine.

So I teach about teams, the relationship between teams, and how to talk to them. Because it’s so daunting, when you get a studio film or any studio project, even if it’s the littlest thing (like a short that’s going to come before a movie), you’re still talking to the studio and all of these executives. It’s daunting and it’s scary, but we’re all just people, and it’s fine. So I think I try to take away a little of the stigma by telling them that and explaining exactly how it works on the inside. Take a little bit of that fear away and that stigma of like, “Oh, this big executive table with suits.” Because no, it’s not that. We’re all just people and it’ll be fine. I think it prepares them not to be nervous. When you go into meetings, I think when you’re a composer there are two things: your music has to be absolutely amazing, but that’s a given, and you have to be charming and able to converse. You’re going to be on this project for two or three years, so the filmmaker has to like you and want to be your friend. It’s all about being friends because it’s such a collaborative art.

How do you balance art and commerce, and stay creative and connected with that spark that drives you?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: The way I stay creative in my job—and it can be really dull at times because I conceptualize all the budgets, not only for production, but for Greenlight, and I track the budgets, I track all invoices, and I liaise with the lawyers to conceptualize the deals with the composer. I go to two concerts a week sometimes, just to find talent. Then I find the talent and I negotiate their deal with my legal team. So it can be very procedural at times, and that’s what’s so beautiful about the music supervision craft: you have all this business side to it, but at the same time, it’s so creative.

My job really starts by reading a script. And so it’s from the beginning, even drafts of ideas for a script. Sometimes they don’t even have a script, but it’s a musical property, so they come to us and are like, “What do you think the best genre is for this or who are the best artists for this?” So I’m there with the filmmakers. I think music supervision is a perfect connection to my previous career in composing. I’m so close to the story, and I help conceptualize the musical voice of the movie (or the series or whatever it is that I’m working on). So I go through the scripts, break it down, see if there’s somebody singing onscreen, and all of the musical cues.

I have to ask things like: “Is somebody quoting a song that we can’t afford?” Because I know how much I put there on that line for licensing! Did somebody suggest a song that’s way too expensive and we cannot afford it?

So I take all of it and just highlight it. Then I go through it with the executive producers if it’s a show, or the director if it’s a movie. And then we really craft that together. Who’s the composer that we’re going to hire for post-production?

There are two things: Pre-production music and post-production music. So pre-production music, especially in animation or any live-action animation, if there’s somebody singing onscreen, you have to have that song ready, either so they can lip sync while they’re shooting or they can animate over it. Pre-production songs are all the songs that will have people singing on them. And that we do during the pre-production phase, along with the script and all of that. There’s a songwriter engaged for that. And all throughout, we’re working on licensed music. These things take three to four years to get from start to finish. The hit of the summer four years ago is not going to be the hit of the summer close to when the movie is going to come out, so we keep changing the songs for it to be current. “What’s the new Bruno Mars song?”; “What’s the new Lady Gaga song that’s going to be big?” So we have to be really conscientious of who’s the next Benson Boone. And so we have to have that in the song world. Pre-production music, licensed music, goes all throughout the process.

And then we have post-production music. That’s score. And so really, you see, from conceptualizing a script until the final mix, we’re a part of it.

So being creative at the job is easy. There are days and days, but the days are so different that sometimes I’m just sitting at my computer and listening to music and talking to filmmakers, and it feels like that keeps my creative juices flowing. And sometimes, I just sit down and look at invoices, but it’s fine. These two sides complement each other.

Give me an example of something you’re currently working on.

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: I’m going to Nashville soon, and I am recording a movie that I’m working on right now. It’s the Gabby’s Dollhouse movie. If you don’t have kids, you won’t know what that is. But if you do, it’s a huge hit, like Paw Patrol. It’s a preschool series. We have a spinoff movie of that, so it’s Kristen Wiig—she’s super funny in it—Gloria Estefan, Jason Mantzoukas, and we have a nice, super funny cast. The movie is amazing, and we’re going to record the orchestra in Nashville. It’s almost a 100-piece orchestra, which is awesome.

The composer is Stephanie Economou. She’s absolutely incredible. And she’s been at Universal with us for quite some time. She’s part of the Composer Development Program, and she’s amazing. She’s doing a lot of video game work as well, and won a Grammy for one of her video game scores.

Speaking of prestigious awards, you recently won an Emmy!

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: So I won an Emmy last year. It was really a kind of impostor-syndrome moment. I’m like, “Am I deserving of this?” Alex Nixon, who is my coworker, my boss, and my dear friend, we’ve been working together for five years now, and she’s my mentor, really. I learned so much from her and she’s been a music supervisor for a long time. She taught me the ropes of everything and she’s amazing at what she does. So we won an Emmy together for Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight, which is a spinoff series from the Kung Fu Panda movies. It was right before Kung Fu Panda 4. And the composers were Kevin Lax, and Bob Lydecker, who are incredible composers as well. The director is Peter Hastings, who just directed the Dog Man movie now.

So we won alongside the composers. We wouldn’t have won if their score wasn’t absolutely incredible. They’re so talented that we hired them the second time for this movie that we’ve made, Orion and the Dark, a streaming film that went straight to Netflix and this year that ran in the same category (Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for an Animated Program). Unfortunately, we didn’t win. But it’s fine because we had won already.

What did winning an Emmy mean to you?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: I was never doing this for the awards. I just do my craft because I’m in love with it, and I cannot survive if I’m not this close to film and television. But it’s always absolutely amazing to get it. I think, especially being an international person from Brazil and having come such a long way, it’s a long road. And I’m right there with all the international students at Berklee. It’s such a special community. It means I’ve done it. I’ve arrived, and it makes me feel safe with my family, and it’s such an accomplishment to be recognized by your peers who are working at the highest level. It’s a pat on the back, like, “You’re doing a good job.” So, it means a lot.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that I’m satisfied. I’m going to keep pushing ahead and all of that, but it’s a nice accomplishment. It just makes me feel sure that I’m doing the right thing and in the right place.

Talk to me a little more about that feeling of knowing you’d arrived. Your career has gone in so many different directions, all of them successful.

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: The only moment that I really felt that I was doing the right thing was when I stepped into music supervision. I was always missing something. When I was a filmmaker, I was missing music. When I was a composer, I was missing my team from the filmmaking days. So music supervision is a profession that I didn’t even know existed. I’m so happy now that Berklee Online has the Music Supervision courses, because had I known about it, I would have gotten into it earlier.

It’s such a mystery because nobody talks about it that much. I’m glad that Berklee is doing this now. I don’t think time is ever wasted when you’re studying, but I think it can be more directed. It was really when I stepped into music supervision because it gives me everything. I’m able to direct the actors when they’re singing onscreen. I’m able to edit things in development. I’m able to exercise my business skills. I am a business person: I like negotiating, I like strategizing, and all of that. I think music supervision is such a good combination of business and art. And I say art because it involves filmmaking and music. It encompasses so many things that I think I can exercise my skills at the highest level by doing it.

What was the moment when you realized you had enough information to teach?

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: I’ve always taught. I think musicians are always teachers. It is either teaching piano, teaching guitar, or teaching voice. So we’re always teaching on the side. But when I realized that I wanted to teach, I think it was when I started at Berklee, actually. I was a DJ at The Birn, the radio station, and I had people who would come in, and I would be their mentors. It was early days, me and Ro Rowan, who is an amazing cellist and was here at Berklee as well. Now they are a session musician in LA. So when Ro and I put together The Birn video team, I had my filmmaking experience, so I would teach people how to work on Final Cut, how to work the board at The Birn. So the Birn was really the early days of my teaching. And I thought it was great because I was older already, because I had gone to college, and I was eager to work. So I’m so happy that I could work at the college and be useful in that way.

But when I realized I had enough information to teach was after DreamWorks, for sure. When I’m taking classes with someone, I want to understand that they have more information than I do. I think that just comes through experience. I think you have to have gone through a lot in life to be able to teach other people through your own mistakes. You can study as much as you want, but you gather information from experience. So I think when I got into DreamWorks and I saw how playing on stages is. I’ve seen so many different things that I feel safe enough, confident enough in my skill set so that I can give it to someone else.

I haven’t yet asked you anything about 1M1 Arte, the company you ran with your husband [Luiz Augusto Buff de Souza e Silva], who I know from his participation in a podcast I produced a number of years ago called The Roaring Crowdfund.

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: That’s right! So after I left Remote Control—I was there for three and a half years—I went back to Brazil for three years. That’s when I had my first son. I wanted to have my son close to my family, so I went back to Brazil with my husband, and we put together a company called 1M1 Arte. I was the lead composer, so I was a creative, and lead music supervisor. In the Brazilian industry, you have to wear a lot of hats. It’s not as segmented as it is here, nor does it have the same volume. So you have to be the music editor, composer, and music supervisor. 1M1 was really a music team structure for the studios in Brazil. We worked with the South American arms of Netflix, Fox, Disney, and Warner. We were doing big studio projects. I was the lead creative, and my husband was the business side of it. So he would do what I do now. Half of what I do today is what he would do then. He’s a music attorney at Universal now. It’s funny how our lives are always side by side, but he would do all the deals with musicians, payments, budgeting, and clearance licensing. I would choose the songs, and he would go through the clearance process.

What I find so fascinating about music supervision is that notion of being a taste-maker. If you find a struggling artist who really has something special, you can really change their fortunes!

Vivian Aguiar-Buff: One hundred percent! That’s what we’re always looking for when we’re looking for artists to be featured in a project. We want the person who is right about to explode. With somebody like Lady Gaga, we’re going to pay way too much money, and it’s not going to do anything for her career, and it’s just going to be like, “Oh, there’s a Lady Gaga song in that movie.” But if you find an artist, that’s right before that … like Bensone Boone three months ago; he’s right on the cusp of becoming a superstar. Then that artist takes the project with them. And the artist is also so excited to participate. They want to be part of all the marketing campaigns. They’re going to post a lot on social media. They’re going to market the movie as if it’s theirs. So that’s what we’re always looking for and that’s why we have to do so much research to go out and see people live, just to see who’s at that stage. Sometimes we get somebody for something and we think they’re going to blow up and they don’t, and that’s fine. But we’re always working with such amazing artists, so it’s going to be good either way.