Film Music

I’m coming to the end of my 12 week course on Film Scoring with Berklee. It has been a tough road. Working with timecodes and socring to video in Logic Pro has been much harder than I had anticipated.

One of the things I have discovered is that writing film music is quite unlike writing most other forms of music. Normally, I would start writing with a melody, a groove and a rythmn. Tempo and the final length of the song only emerge once one is well into the writing process. In fact, it is not unusal to settle on a tempo once the song is virtually finished.

By contrast, in film music you start with time – not just tempo and beats, but absolute time. To aim at writing 15 seconds of music, with a dramatic moment at 2.5 seconds and 9.875 seconds takes some getting used to.

What the course has also done is drive home the “narrative” function of music, that is, the music’s role in helping to tell the story. Watching a number of examples of films I had scene without their score, it was clear how emotionally “empty” they became.

One of the examples from the course was the city scene from Baraka. I took the liberty of rescoring that scene with music that better fitted my “ideology” of city life and it was stunning the way the scene seemed to tell a very different story.

I’ll write some more once the final assignments are in (scoring a documentary) and I have a clearer head. Without doubt I will be commenting more on music in my film reviews and adding a section to the draft book on Film and Theology.

[tags] Film Scoring [/tags]