We tend to remember music, even tunes we’ve heard for only a brief moment. Their melody sticks to our memory, and while we may not recall where we heard it, we do remember how it made us feel. That’s what’s so magical about music, and it’s what we hope to achieve with our films and videos. Our audience may not remember the names of our characters, what they wore, or exactly what they said. But if they remember how that story made them feel, we’ve met our goal as filmmakers. Just as strong characters, a good story, stunning visuals and immersive sound design helps to accomplish this goal, so does well composed music.
Music as a Narrative Tool
From our perspective as video and film producers, music serves as a critical narrative tool in building a story.
Transitions: Music works with the visuals and sound design to transition from one scene to another. Visually, we’ll cue a scene transition in a number of ways: by having the character walk out of the frame, using establishing shots of location, or denoting the time of day/season using footage of the surrounding environment. But music is the ultimate cue, as we can time a piece to come to a conclusion at the end of one scene, and begin to build with a different tone and melody in the next. The music was especially critical in “Moments”, a video we produced for Georgetown with the goal of creating alumni connection to the University during the end-of-year giving season. In this video, there was no narration, no dialogue and no text until the very end. The images and sounds were assembled to capture life as a college student at Georgetown in 2 minutes or less, but the music was really critical to creating a feeling of wonder at the introduction, building at the middle, and culminating to a powerful end at graduation.
Foreshadowing: Music can also help to foreshadow a particular scene, good or bad. In Fate of A Salesman, there’s a critical scene in which a man is taping up a sign to hang on the store’s awning. The audience does not yet know that the sign reads “For Lease”. This is when the audience first learns the fate of Men’s Fashion Center. The characters do not say right away that the store is closing; instead we reveal it through the heartbreaking scene of the salesmen looking on as the sign goes up. But the music, ambient with a serious and foreboding tone, delivers a cue to the audience that something difficult is around the corner. You can purchase Fate of a Salesman on DVD if you’d like to see this scene and the whole film, scored by the talented Ari Ingber (@ariingber), who also happens to the nephew of one of our film’s characters.
Ushering In Emotion: Music can be a helpful tool in ushering an audience through the complex series of emotions they feel while experiencing a story. It’s not meant as the sole tool to creating emotion, but rather a compliment or enhancing factor. And in many ways, the absence of music can be critical to a scene. In Alvin & Arlene, a sensitive story about how a hospice care organization helped one man deal with the impending loss of his sister, we asked our composer not to score the section in which Alvin describes in painful detail his sister’s battle with cancer. Adding music here would have felt too heavy handed and unnecessary in conveying the emotional impact we were striving for.
The Composer’s Process
We asked the very talented Doug Kaufman, who has scored the music for many of our client videos, to share a little about his process. Here’s what he had to say:
My workflow usually starts with watching through a piece several times and trying to get a feel for the emotion and structure of the video. It’s really easy with music sometimes to be overly forceful in telling the viewer what to feel at a given moment, so what I try to do is just find the feelings that naturally exist in a story first and then amplify them with the score.
