Film music guest person stuff (this is a blog)

This week’s forum saw us all learning about music in film. It’s a pretty involved process, lots of teamwork involved. Essentially, no sound in film is source sound. For one thing, reality is not exaggerated enough. Hollywood has us used to hearing the whoosh of air and the smack of skin when someone pulls a punch and the rustling of clothes when someone moves, the crunching of gravel when someone walks and the jangling of car keys in their pocket. It’s the attention to these minute details that suspend the viewer’s disbelief (well, I think so anyway). The person in charge of this magic is the Foley artist. (All but rustling, someone else is in charge of rustling). In Hollywood, the workload is split up into very specific parts, everyone specialises (like Japanese mechanics). You have the - Foley artist, - Rustle track guy, - The person in charge of overdubbing the dialogue, - Someone who composes scores, - Someone who arranges them, - Someone who makes them readable - Librarian (a surprisingly important member of the film making army) As far as composing film music is concerned, it is hard not to be influenced by the temp track (according to our guest speaker). Before composing a note, go and talk the director/producer and get as much of an idea as to what they want and what would be appropriate for respective scenes. Also, get an idea of what instruments you have to play with. When composing, it is important to remember that at the end of the day, dialogue comes FIRST. Compose sound that will compete with the dialogue and it will be squashed down and hidden in the background. Likewise, if a character is singing on screen, accompanying music will need to be small. Point of View camera shots are a good opportunity to put in some additional music. Ask yourself ‘why is the camera moving, what is it trying to portray?’ Lastly, the guest speaker played us the promotional video for a Sony game to which he composed the music and created the sound effects. He suggests attempting to source sounds from the Hollywood vaults of recordings as Hollywood has the money to create the best quality recordings around. He told us a tale of a fellow who spent a day recording sports cars racing down a tunnel. My conclusions in respect to the actual music were that, game music is a good opportunity to play with MIDI and create what is essentially techno/electronica.