Music Is My…
This has been mentioned by festival directors, film school professors, and film production “how-to” authors time and time again…but I’ll say it once more:
Music is as important (and sometimes more important) as the acting, the cinematography, and the story of a film.
Forget this lesson at your peril. (“No, it’s much too perilous!”) Forget this lesson, and your “okay” film becomes a cheesy one. Or even worse, your good film misses out on the chance to be a truly great one.
Whether it be setting the mood, cuing the audience into plot points, or regulating the emotional highs and lows of the story, music that fits the piece is an essential element of filmmaking.
“Get the film In The Can at all cost” is an admirable and understandable mantra. However, considering the music in your film an afterthought that you will worry about later in Post, is quite simply, a mistake.
This may seem obvious to a lot of people reading this, but after screening countless numbers of entries for Filmshift, I have seen music make or break a film’s credibility, entertainment value, and artistic weight.
There is nothing more enjoyable than experiencing a film with images and sound working together to tell the story. And there is almost nothing more heartbreaking than a film that makes you laugh because of the music, when the filmmaker obviously wanted you to cry instead.
All that hard work, money, and meaning lost because of a Casio keyboard trying and failing to sound dramatic.
Music is your friend. Consider it as essential an element as having a camera to shoot the film in the first place. Or don’t, and your film could become the next “The Room,” which wouldn’t be so bad, but I think you get my point. Music. Yeah.
