By Isabella Woods

In a world where CGI and 3D seem to dominate every movie, many modern moviegoers have forgotten just how important film scores are for creating mood, atmosphere and effects. While whiz-bang special effects have their place, often some of the most tense, memorable and emotional scenes in movie history are the result of the right music at the right time. Whether it’s a Hollywood production, a local commercial, or a YouTube video promoted by a viral marketing agency, the right music score can turn a piece of action or drama into something memorable, emotive and engaging.

For some films, while the images and drama have long disappeared from our memories, the score remains, awakening memories of what we’ve seen whenever we hear the film’s music. On some occasions, the music score becomes even memorable than the actors and plot and is Just as integral.

1. Jaws

Perhaps the most famous use of music, John Williams’ shark theme was incredibly simple, just alternating E and F notes played on a tuba. The result was not only suspenseful, but in Spielberg’s own words, “without it the film would not have been half as successful.” For most of the film, the score was the only representation of the shark. Special effect problems plagued the set, with the shark’s animatronics not functioning the way Spielberg had hoped. For most of the movie, Williams’ score was the shark, and the tempo of the two alternating notes generated all the suspense and terror that made the film a worldwide hit and launched the careers of both Stephen Spielberg and John Williams.

2. Psycho

In Hitchcock’s most notorious thriller, Bernard Herrmann’s famous score also provided terror and suspense. The infamous shower scene, which at the time had audiences fleeing the theatres in horror, is a testament to the power of a good film score. The reason audiences found the scene so disturbing was nothing to do with the visuals – the actual onscreen action only depicts the flash of a blade and Janet Leigh screaming – but Bernard Herrmann’s use of a screeching violin, which generated the true terror of the scene.

Hermann also helped generate the film’s pace and general atmosphere with the main music he composed for the film. A tense arrangement of two melodic lines, the music generates a threat of violence that while not actually present through the first twenty minutes of the film, keeps the audience anticipating it, which maximizes the suspension for when the action eventually does occur.

3. Lawrence of Arabia

Music not only generates tension and emotion but it can also invoke a sense of majesty and location. David Lean’s classic historical drama was one of the most picturesque movies of all time. Maurice Jarre’s magnificent film score, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, accompanied the epic landscapes and stunning cinematography to such an extent you can almost feel the desert heat and shimmering landscapes.

4. The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Another score that befits its setting perfectly is Ennio Morricone’s, who used gunfire, whistles and native Mexican chants to invoke a sense of time and place. Using different instruments to accompany the presence of the three main protagonists, Morricone’s score also helped generate character in Sergio Leone’s classic western, making viewers only too aware of who the good, the bad and the ugly were.

5. Godfather

The Nina Rota score in Francis Ford Coppola’s epic crime drama is another of cinema’s most memorable pieces of music, and one of the most controversial. The operatic feel of the music fitted the movie perfectly. However, some of the score was not originally made for the film. Rota’s Love Theme, now so famous with its haunting violins and distinctly Italian feel, was originally used in a 1958 comedy called Fortunella. The music, however, has now become so synonymous with Godfather it would be hard to imagine the film without it.

6. Star Wars

Using a classical orchestra soundtrack in a science fiction action film was an odd juxtaposition, and yet John Williams’ music is now one of the most famous film scores of all time. While the film’s dialogue and characterization lacked depth, the music provided the much needed emotion, which helped shaped the warmth of the protagonists and the foreboding nature of Darth Vader and the Empire.

Documentary Films have a different process than a fictional narrative.  Most of the time, the filmmaker has a story outline they are trying to tell, but as shooting commences, life happens!  Unexpected events arise and what was going to be the dramatic climax is eclipsed by something more interesting or unusual.

To use music to score the film, you can hire a composer to start developing a library of musical themes for the story.  This is something I’ve done several times and it works quite well.  Because of the fluid nature of documentaries, you can provide the only constant to the whole process which is a consistent emotional tone with the music.  Documentaries come together in the editing process and by having a library of thought out music to tell this story is extremely helpful.

You can also do this by carefully selecting similar pieces of music in a production music library like 300 Monks.  Sometimes you can get great results by using several different pieces by the same composer or even different sections of the same piece.  By the way, you can tell if a piece is by the same composer by the visual icon which are assigned to each composer.

You can also wait until a rough edit of the picture is done and then score the piece with a composer or by choosing from our music library.

Ways to Use Music In a Documentary

• Create a memorable theme that becomes the audio mnenomic and branding for the film.  This is what every television series and commercial tries to do, why not you?
• Create musical themes for characters to unite the storytelling
• Create musical themes for sections of the story
• Background emotional shading – music is pure emotion and can often lead the audience to a heightened feeling that was impossible without it
• Foreshadowing of something to come
• To unite a montage of pictures, video
• Covering up the sound of bad production audio
• Masking location audio which you have no rights to, such as the radio is on in the background
• Ironic or strange juxtapositions – You can do what Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Cameron Crowe famously do, put music emotionally is the opposite of what we would expect.

Here’s a video that goes over some of the basics of music for a documentary.  He forgot to mention that you can license music through a website like ours for affordable and legal clearance.

Unfortunately, we don’t see the shot with and without the music, but listening to the discussion gives a broad overview of how composers and music supervisors approach storytelling aspect. I always think of scoring film as sort of like taking a big gigantic AUDIO HIGHLIGHTER through the script which I use in multiple colors to draw attention and manipulate the emotions of the audience.

This is mostly about the relationship aspect of making a film work with building a good creative team which includes Director, Producer, Composer and Music Supervisor.

All of these tracks are available for instant download and have been pre-cleared and royalty free for your use.

Check out all of Kevin’s eclectic and exciting catalog.

Here’s a few of my favorites off the top.

Chaser – Hard edged and driving, but with elements of beauty, this pulsating contemporary electronic instrumental is perfect for Xtreme Sports, Ski Movie, X Games, Fashion, Racing, or Crime Drama, Getaway, Chase Scene, Movie Theme, Trailer, Credits

Alice’s Dream – Danny Elfman ish eerie waltz. Starts off with vocalese and harmonium and gradually adds orchestral and electronic elements as it builds in intensity. Great for Christmas scene with elves or any magical Tim burton ish type of scene.

Lawn Jockey 30 - quirky instrumental with acoustic guitar and accordion as the featured voices adding bass and a good drumbeat. Would make a great companion to a quirky, humorous spot. Anything from Lawn Doctor to kid’s energy bars to vacation fun

Onward – Ethereal beginning with acoustic guitar and piano gives this reaffirming instrumental track a feeling of beginning, like the start of a new day or beginning of a journey. Great for show intro, family drama, youth drama, self awareness. historical exploration documentary, biography .

This is cool. Musikpitch is a new site where advertisers can launch a contest and composers/songwriters/bands can then submit custom music for the project. The budget is clearly listed and MusikPitch keeps the publishing and administers the licensing.

Almost completely gone are the days when ad agencies would actually select a handful of music companies to exclusively work with on a project, award them demo fees and then final fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Check it out.  I wish I had a room where these players would drop from suspension wires whenever I needed them!

Interesting how infectious that theme is and how it has lasted the test of time – mainly because of that cool rhythm.  Could it be Lalo Schifrin‘s Argentinian upbringing?  Tango anyone?

And yes, the tea does things for me, though I prefer the pearl jasmine tea I get down in Chinatown at $100 per pound.  Man!  Just talking about makes me want to go brew a pot!

Enjoy!

Andrew

Just added 7 great tracks from Nicky Needle.  We are so fortunate to have so many great Acoustic and Americana options in our royalty free music library.

Check them out:

Cold Miracle A minimalist bluegrass piece that sounds straight out of T Bone Burnett and Cold Mountain. Price: $27.00

Desert Minor Haunting slow acoustic guitar blues. Beautiful. Price: $27.00

Open D Slow passing of time. Electric and acoustic guitars. Pensive moody. Price: $27.00

Song for my Friend Beautiful acoustic guitar solo. Lullaby-like and comforting. Price: $27.00

Tangled Cables Slow acoustic guitar solo. Thinking through the events leading up to this moment. Price: $27.00

We’ve just added a bunch of new powerful, dramatic and often heroic, sometimes dark music soundtracks to our Underscore-Drama section of the Online Royalty Free Music Store.

Check out these and the entire collection.

1. EPILOGUE
   

   Massive, grand and climactic orchestral pinnacle, followed by a warm yet thoughtful epilogue. Excellent for triumphant yet bittersweet epic endings. “Victory is ours, yet at what cost?” Very dramatic, with high production values and stunning realism. Keywords: Grand, Epic, Dramatic, Climax, Powerful, Orchestral, Massive, Filmic.  By Dave Klotz.

2. Let Them Try
   An orchestral rock guitar hybrid that builds and then releases into a gentle classical guitar and strings theme. Effective for a film underscore that needs an edge with a tender heart. A hero with a heart?  By Proofsound.
3. Memories of WW2 –
   Passionate , sad , noble French horns , strings , piano, oboe ,el. Piano ,harp 1min 56sec – by Alex Khaskian
4. Mrs. Tinkle
   Magical big Hollywood like Harry Potter meets Mrs. Doubtfire. By Sebastian Morawietz.
5. No Way Back
   Intense, bold, big orchestral rock metal hybrid. Action, action, action! Similar to stuff from the Hans Zimmer school of scoring. Blockbuster sound.  By Proofsound.
6. The Getaway Plan
   Insistent bass and guitar riff with pounding drums drive this action filled rock track.  Great for a Guy Ritchie type Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels action piece.  By Robert Wayne Johnson.
7. Yup It’s The Big Action Cue
   A massive, dramatic, hollywood style film cue suitable for anything involving frenetic action and excitement. Huge orchestra, powerful drum, chunky guitars and industrial elements make this cue perfect for any battle, chase, or disaster sequence. Keywords: Action, battle, chase, huge, orchestral, hollywood, adventure, power.  By Dave Klotz.
8. Burning The Witch
   Exactly like it sounds.  By Marinho Nobre.

And how do you get your music into their engine?  One guy with an overflowing desk.

Also interesting to note that founder Tim Westergren was a film composer who had to decode film director’s likes and dislikes on a daily basis.  Sounds familiar!

Read full article.

What a sound!

Associated Press

PARIS – A French musicians guild says Oscar-winning film composer Maurice Jarre has died at the age of 84.

Jarre is best known for writing the haunting song “Lara’s Theme” from the film “Doctor Zhivago.”

SACEM head Bernard Miyet cites Jarre’s family Monday as saying the composer died in his California villa.

Jarre penned dozens of scores for some of Hollywood’s most prominent directors.

He won Oscars for his music for “Doctor Zhivago,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” and “Passage to India,” and was nominated for an additional six Academy Awards.

Jarre was born in 1924 in Lyon, France, and studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris before starting his career composing scores for theatrical productions. He has lived in the U.S. for decades.

The ability to boil down a story to it’s minimum is at the heart of crafting a logline.  It’s filmmaking 101.  What’s a logline? It’s the sentence(s) you read in the TV guide excerpt, or on the movie poster or in the reviews.  But what’s interesting is that this exercise in concise articulation is very powerful.  It can be applied to every project you work on regardless of industry.

When I was working as an MTV VJ, I realized early on that just reading the teleprompter made for stilted, boring and ridiculous presentation.  I started scanning the script beforehand, boiling it down to the 3 or 4 essential points I needed to make, and then paraphrase the script.  It made for much more relaxed, natural conversation.  Over drinks with my friend and persuasive communications presentation coach, Dan Broden, we discussed how this was one of the secrets he teaches to Fortune 500 CEOs and superstar athletes.  Basically, it’s boiling down your presentation to its essentials, being prepared.  It’s kind of like having a logline for what you are discussing.

President Obama does this very well.  Filmmakers, though they have less at stake (some would say arguably) must perfect this skill to be able to pitch their project successfully.  As do lawyers, sales people, even parents.  And when direcing your film and discussing it with cast,  and  crew including editors, composers and art directors, you need to be able to clearly define what is happening from the big picture to scene by scene moments.

“A ________must_________in order to ____________.”

Fill in those blanks and you can see how concise, clear and articulate you become.  And if you speak it like the movie voiceover guy, then you’re sure to have a blockbuster.

From Filmslinger:

A logline conveys the dramatic story of a screenplay in the most abbreviated manner possible. It presents the major throughline of the dramatic narrative without character intricacies and sub-plots.  It is the story boiled down to its base.  A good logline is one sentence.  More complicated screenplays may need a two sentence logline.

Crafting a logline takes a great deal of practice and an understanding of basic dramatic structure.

At a minimum, a Logline must tell:

• who the story is about
• what he strives for.
• what stands in his way.

A logline does not tell the whole story.  Using these three story elements, a good logline depicts the dramatic narrative in a clear fashion.

Read full article at Filmslinger.

- Andrew Ingkavet is Head Monk, Executive Producer and Composer for 300 Monks, an audio agency providing custom music scores, music supervision and music licensing to film studios, ad agencies and independent producers.

Jackman scored lots of stuff before being noticed by Hans Zimmer.  Interesting to note Trevor Rabin has 2 films in the top ten this week.  Not bad for a guy who was the replacement guitarist in Yes. (okay he was much more than that.)

Top Ten Box Office Films by Composer

1. Henry Jackman – Monsters vs Aliens
2. Robert J. Kral – The Haunting In Connecticut
3. Marco Beltrami - Knowing
4. Theodore Shapiro – I Love You Man
5. James Newton Howard – Duplicity
6. Trevor Rabin – Race to Witch Mountain
7. Trevor Rabin - 12 Rounds
   
8. Tyler Bates – Watchmen
9. Nathaniel Mechaly – Taken
10. John Murphy – The Last House On The Left

I came across a well written

It is alive...

overview of horror films that discuses the many ways filmmakers use to terrify their audiences.  Of course, music is one of the main tools.

Below is the trailer to the Blair Witch Project, which of course, uses sound design and music to freak you out.

And if you’re looking for someone to score your horror flick, I highly recommend our scariest monk, Marinho Nobre.  Dark and spooky, but a consummate professional- award-winning too.

First film fest in USA to recognize Movie Music

Our Head Monk and film composer Andrew Ingkavet has been nominated for Best Movie Music at the upcoming 2009 Garden State Film Festival. It is the first film festival in the USA to add the category for Best Movie Music. The recognition comes for the score for the PBS documentary New Jersey’s Red October and features a minimalist Americana soundtrack performed by Ingkavet with Mike Stidolph.  Congrats Andrew!

Here’s a short clip of the documentary film directed by Nancy O’Mallon.

An evolution in BAMcinematek’s programming, the festival will effectively replace the Sundance at BAM series, which for the past few years brought films from the Sundance Film Festival to Brooklyn.  However, the new fest is opening with Sundance offering “Don’t Let Me Drown,” from director Cruz Angeles. The is being programmed by the BAMcinematek team, lead by Program Director Florence Almozini.

See more at Indiewire.

For weekend of February 22 2009 – according to Variety

1. _____________- no composer! Licensed music only – Madea Goes To Jail
2. Nathaniel Mechaly – Taken
3. Bruno Coulais, They Might Be Giants – Coraline
4. Cliff Eidelman – He’s Just Not That Into You
5. A.R. Rahman – Slumdog Millionaire – ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST SCORE (+ song too!)
   
6. Steve Jablonsky – Friday The 13th
7. James Newton Howard – Confessions of A Shopaholic
8. Waddy Wachtel – Paul Blart Mall Cop
9. Richard Gibbs – Fired Up!
10. Rheinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer – The International

Horror’s on top!

1. Steve Jablonsky – Friday the 13th
2. Cliff Eidelman – He’s Just Not That Into You
3. Nathaniel Mechaly – Taken
4. Bruno Coulais, They Might Be Giants – Coraline
5. James Newton Howard – Confessions of A Shopaholic
6. Waddy Wachtel – Paul Blart Mall Cop
7. Christophe Beck – Pink Panther 2
8. Rheinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer – The International
9. A.R. Rahman – Slumdog Millionaire
10. Neil Davidge – Push

1. Cliff Eidelman – He’s Just Not That Into You
2. Nathaniel Mechaly – Taken
3. Bruno Coulais, They Might Be Giants – Coraline
4. Christophe Beck – Pink Panther 2
5. Waddy Wachtel – Paul Blart Mall Cop
6. Neil Davidge – Push
7. A.R. Rahman – Slumdog Millionaire
8. Kyle Eastwood, Michael Stevens – Gran Torino
9. Christopher Young – The Uninvited
10. John Debney – Hotel For Dogs

To score your film, license music or more, feel free to contact 300 Monks at 1-888-211-5945.

A recent trailhead discovery could prove very exciting for Terminator fans as it appears to be the beginning of a viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Terminator: Salvation film. Skynet Research has little more than a message claiming that “Skynet Research is Coming,” and registration for e-mail updates but the legitimacy of the site as more than a fan creation is helped by the privacy policy…  – more from ARG Network

The coming film is scored by Danny Elfman with a release of May 2009.