Just as amateur projects, what's the best way to go about scoring the movie? Should it be all original music, or is there music with easy to attain rights?

Hi Josh, Welcome to the forum.

You will find the "search" function very helpful on this board. Most of what you want to find out, can be done without waiting for a reply from someone simply by searching with a few select key words.

You can get a lot of what you want to know by reading this well constructed faq

http://dvinfo.net/articles/index.php#business

As a short answer to your question, it's always best to attain royalty free music for your productions. If you can't score or create your own from software designed for such a purpose, do a search on GOOGLE for 'royalty free' music. NOTE - this does not mean 'free'... you will have to pay for it. But it is very reasonable.

Good luck!

Original is safest, but you can find royalty-free music at places like magnatune.com (http://magnatune.com/info/licensing)

Just as amateur projects, what's the best way to go about scoring the movie? Should it be all original music, or is there music with easy to attain rights?

There are any number of sources for music with inexpensive rights. Do a google search on "buy-out libraries" and "needle-drop libraries" and you'll turn up lots. Also take a look at a program called "sonicFire Pro" from a company called SmartSound. They market buy-out libraries that have special coding imbedded in the music that works with the SonicFire program to allows you to essentially recompose on the screen the music to fit your program. For instance, you can take a 1 minute piece and tell the software to recompose it to 5 minutes by replicating the middle segments but change the mood from hard driving and upbeat to laid-back and relaxed halfway through.