Just submitted an edit of a short film for my colleagues to
criticise. I thought of writing a little something about it. It's
a bit challenging, though, since this is a topic I actually know
about, unlike my typical rants here.
I'm not going to tell you how to compose a story, but instead I
will give you a few pearls of wisdom that I have collected along
the way. Let's talk about music in film.
I use an inordinate amount of time searching for the right song
for my videos. I have a system, sort of.
The song has to have a structure that you can reflect in your
film. This can be chronologically the same as your edit, or you
can edit the song to fit your video. Usually it's a bit of both
for me. I will first try to find a song that works for the pivotal
moment of my film. Then I will go through the other stuff that
the same artist has produced and see if there is anything that
works for the other moments in the film. If there isn't, I will
try to look for another very similar artist, with similar
instrument and so on. I will also brutally edit the shit out of
the song if I have to. Like, I will loop the tranquil moment of
the song and mix it in with the start of the climax and stuff like
that. I don't know if these artists would like to see what I did
with their songs.
Why do I do this? Music is a level of emotional structure for the
film that you can't get to otherwise. I can't have an orchestra
for my little films, like they have in Hollywood, so I will have
to mimic what they do with their orchestras. You can build stuff
up without music, but then you are only relying on two levels of
narration: What the people say and what you show them do. Music
adds sort of a premonition to what the viewer sees because music
moves slightly slower than the visual side of the film so it
often "primes" the moment before we see it. Also, music can
deepen the message of what the characters are saying. I can't
make music, so I just have to make do with what I can use. And
edit the shit out of it.
The hardest thing about music is how to know when you have
overdone or underdone it. I personally like to either select a
song that is not in discord with what is happening on the screen,
in other words use elevator music just to create an ambience,
or (preferably) find a song that is pushing the style of the
film to the edge of believability. This is really quite hard to
do, so I don't actually suggest this for a beginner, but basically
I will choose a song that goes as close as I can get to making fun
of the genre I am in, without actually going over that limit.
The trick to doing this is to find a song that is within
a stereotypical movie song genre (strings, ambient, piano, rock)
and that has "something" in it. Some clever trick or some note
that makes the melody a bit edgy. Then it will work in the
stereotypical setting, since it breaks the stereotype slightly.
Another thing is to take a melody that isn't sticky. There are a
set of melodies that stay in your mind from the first time you
hear them. These are bad for movie soundtracks. You may use them
in a way that you use the melody in a particular spot in the
beginning of the movie and then at a very specific spot in the
end, for example, but this has to be implemented in a surgical
fashion in order to work properly.
And then, when you have made that edit, reaching for the edges
of absurdity, you will have to submit it to the criticism of your
peers and see if you overdid it.
