Lessons

Lesson Info

Available Tools & Assets

other told about three different aspects of music in in filmmaking. So there's music like songs that you're already familiar with or that were written, particularly for seen or whatever it might be. But a lot of times there's a lot of music in television and film that you're familiar with now. There's also lots of music that's available online for free royalty. Free music that you are, yeah, right royalty free music that you could get and layer into any project you're using. Or you can use really famous music in a project if it's just for you. So, like even I have a new sizzle reel on my on my website for my food work, and I laid in a song that I really like. But I don't have license for that song, but I'm not marketing it either. So don't be afraid that if you're building something for your riel or you're doing a sizzle or you're doing anything that's not gonna be marketed and sold that you could probably utilize music that you can get on Spotify or on Apple music or Amazon or whateve...

r. Lay that music in and make something pretty cool. So and so in Music for movies, though, are for other types of film projects. There's music and then their score, and the score is something that's written particularly for your project. So, like we know the motor like one of the more famous scores and continue ums of score through a film. Um, Siri's is John Williams with, with the start, the Star Wars, right? So like we know that that orchestra music, we know what it means. We know what it makes us feel like. And it's laid in through everything, or like something like the Star Trek theme right, which is played throughout and is even on the new series that they have on CBS. There's a new theme that is akin to it, but then it picks that theme up at the very end of the of the opening credits. So their score. And then there's what's called Bajevic music, which is when you have actual radios or some music or something playing in the scene. So it's not part of the score or the over or the after part. It's actually supposed to be in the scene, so there's a way to make it sound that way. or you can actually capture it the way it is in real life. But that's a that's a There's a difference for the audience between characters reacting to the music or the music reacting to the characters. And that's the difference between like score and laid in music and then digested music because we're talking about something that's part of the story that's happening on the screen. Eso That's an important distinction when it comes to sound and music in terms of filmmaking. Okay, and then So in terms of that's a lot of stuff for just the audio, right? So for both of those of us who come out of a visual world, I just went through six different elements of sound and music and all of these things that are part off building a narrative in a film on then in terms of the, uh, the other parts of the visual look. So something like coloring, which we've talked about. And then we talked about people who have excellent Photoshopped skills, maybe being really good at being a colorist if they learn that skill set, and that software that is also part off the the narrative storytelling process in that you can adjust and add texture, and I'm create different feels and looks with the way you're going to color the film. If it's gonna be a little darker and moodier. If it's gonna be a lighter and brighter whatever your you know, you want it to look old fashioned, you wanted to look like Super eight film. Whatever you might do, you might figure that out with your colorist and figure out how, what kind of after effects you might put in. That's another piece of software that helps we with graphic effects and different things, to enhance video and enhanced color on add things that are after the fact in post production. Then we talk about something like rotoscoping. Now this was the big ah ha moment for me when it was like, Oh, well, we can take those scratches in the table out in post and someone had to tell me, Yeah, it's not as easy as the magic wand or whatever. You know, the patch tool. You can't do that in video. It's super expensive. So like getting it right on film is really important. So for photographers coming out of the tradition where we just photoshopped a stuff out of the picture. Yeah, Okay. Think about that. Doing that at, ah, 30 frames, 60 frames, 90 frames per second and trying to fix a scar on a frame. No, you're not gonna do it. Even at 24 frames, it's crazy. Now there were time. There are times when you need to do rotoscoping because it's just essential, and you have to just bite the bullet and get it done. But it is not cheap, and it's not easy, so get it right on camera. So if there's something that Ness's, this is why being at monitor if you are the director or you're the producer or you're somebody who's invested heavily in what's going on on that screen. This is why when the 80 calls for last looks, you are paying attention because if something goes wrong and you end up having to rodeo it out, it's gonna be a big, big expense, and you do not usually do not budget for things like that. So that's important. Okay, so then we have things like graphics motion graphics, which is usually typeface or other types of sort of things that are moving across the screen on in special effects, which are all added in postproduction and again, depending on your budget, depending on your skill set, whether or not you could use something like after effects and you feel comfortable in it. These are all things that you could add and these air part of your tool kit for post production that will add to your story. Add to your your overall narrative and the look and make it look super slick. You know, the better you get it. All of these things in combination. The slicker your project will look, the more professional it would look. But the reality is that depending on your you're part point of view and the output that you're looking to promote, some of this may not be necessary. But the reality is being aware that it's there. I'll give you a simple example. Let's say you're a YouTube right and you become pretty skilled at doing something and you're the video audio engineer of your own project, and all of a sudden somebody says to you, could you do that? But I want you to do that on a bigger level, like I want. I want to give you the tools toe, do it bigger, you know, and better. But you're not aware of all these things. You might have to take some time in between to figure out how you would grow it up and scale it up. That's what That some of the terminology here all the time. How does this scale up or down? And the idea is that what I'm pointing you toward here is scaling up. So if you understand the top level of how these things were done, scaling it back is a lot easier to understand that I could use just some of these tools and then all of a sudden I have a whole bunch of other things I can do, so that is very, very important. And I think it's really, um, effective in understanding the bigger picture, which we've talked about on a couple of occasions. So let me take a little stop here, see how we're doing on the webs on the interwebs. Do you talk about what the music or the score needs to sound like in preproduction? How do you How do you determine that? How do you communicate that? That's really interesting that you ask that. Okay, so during the process, no, I would say it depends on the clearly It depends on the director and whether or not his whether scores a big component for him. But in our case, we weren't even certain we were gonna have an overall scoring kind of scenario. What what we ended up with with something much more than we had anticipated, because we were thinking about MAWR off a musical approach. And we ended up with more of a scoring approach. A little bit of a combination clearly. But, um, we listen to different composers, and we put out the word that we were looking for composers. And then we got the reels of different composers and listen to their music. And then the core team of the film list in tow. All the different composers independently, and we all reported back. I like this guy, but I don't like this guy. And then whoever kind of was the consensus, uh, who, like the work the best ended up being this composer named Jacques, and he was really great, and he really understood what we wanted. And he produced something that was excellent. and then we actually were able to get a full orchestra in in Hungary to execute it. And he was conducting remotely via via Skype. And then Julia was listening. So like we had people in, like, different cities and all around the world participating in this one scoring session, and it was remarkable and it sounds amazing and it was sounds it sounds really rich, and it sounds great. So, um, I think in terms of like doing as much planning as you can, I think obviously you want to try to do as much planning as you can. But it's very hard to anticipate everything, particularly on your 1st 1 I think as you go as we go forward, probably learned a lot about a project of this scale and maybe bigger and what we would need to do to make it be even smoother. But I think as a first big ticket project, we did pretty well. I mean, way overcame lots of logistical issues, whether casting situations, you know, travel, all of the different things that you would think with a lot of moving parts would be problematic. But you do as much planning as you can, and then you adjust and fix the problems as they happen. Pretty much it. Yeah, so as you did in the pre production process, I understand there's myriad decisions to be made. Lots of folks involved. Is there ever a threshold for when something's not working? You might just table it move on or, Ah, I guess my questions. Is there ever a problem? It's too big in pre production. We might skip it and move on, um, or is everything important to nail down in that room to get on our plans so we could move forward? Yeah, it's hard to kick stuff down down the road, especially if you think it's something significant to what's going to be part of the production. So I think that you might have to change course on it, but I don't think you can kick it down the road. I think you have to address all of the pieces independently before you actually get into it, because if something even just one piece is wrong, it's gonna throw the whole project off. So let you know. I mean, I'm trying to think of an example t give you, but it's sort of like, No, just make sure you nail that stuff down because if you go into it and all of a sudden you're like, yeah, I wasn't sure what kind of lens I wanted to use on this, and then all of a sudden, you're like, I was kind of undecided, and then you're on set and you're like, Oh, my God, I know what to Dio, you know, it's it's any of these projects. And you know this from photography is that if you step out on set and you and there's any doubt about what you're trying to do, it affects you in a way that and it affects everything in a way that is a cascading effect is that I'm unsure about this. I don't know how I want to execute this. And then everything starts to kind of just disintegrate around you, and it's in. Think about that. With all of more moving parts, it gets even more complicated. So