Fucking MUSIC

[cmdrhobbes]

I’m STILL directing my second episode of Dixie Stenberg…I’m on the FINAL few steps. Adding music, polishing my assistant director’s stuff, putting everything together and shipping it off for review.

Dixie is a show set in the 1940s (during and just after The War, y’see). The music and sound effects should reflect that to some extent. Yeah, the

Comments

[spiralsequin]

I really feel for you with the music. It's one of those things - it can either work first time for no good reason whatsoever, or more likely, take hours and hours of trying everything under the sun to find the right emotion. It used to take me almost as long to do that part as it did to mix the bloomin' scene. All the best with it.

But yes - just transitional stings is the way to go, imo! :-P

[rfrancis]

Says the woman who did Red Sands Investigation exactly that way, yeah. :)

I'm of two minds about it. There are scenes that the instant they're done I'm dying to add some music for one reason or another (frankly, sometimes to do with line quality), and then the rest of the time I'd be tempted to leave it out.

I still haven't entirely decided how that's going to work on Earth P Show I Can't Name -- no question I can pretty much get my way on that, the moreso than just because I'm the writer for, again, reasons I won't go into, but... now I have to figure out what my way is. :P

[spiralsequin]

Exactly! :-) Although with Red Sands it was intentional from the start, it would have been almost impossible to do any other way as the episodes are over 30 mins. Finding that much creative commons, suitable music that didn't repeat would've been nigh on impossible.

You do a grand job with Wonder Woman, so I'm sure you'd do the same with the new Earth P show if the eps are of similar length.

I don't know - do Earth P shows have to match up stylistically, so that they can mesh for the crossover? There's still quite a range of directing styles and music, but if the new one had an OTR-style minimalism, would that work with the others? (I think I'd be in favour of it, whatever).

I sometimes find too much music distracting from the dialogue and fx - although yes, like you say, it's a real gift when you've got mismatched line quality in there and even brown noise won't cover it.

Looking forward to the Earth P show you can't name. :-)

[rfrancis]

I dunno, consider Catwoman with its use of classic rock songs, for example... I think there's some variance amongst Earth P shows in this regard.

How I direct Wonder Woman isn't necessarily an indicator of how That Show will sound, of course, because it's meant for Susan (and Megan) to approve of how it sounds, as you well know, and even though that's a lot more independent on my part nowadays, I still have that in mind when I make music choices for WW. Will I want different choices for That Show? We'll see. :)

Here's a for-example, though: I've always been tempted by consistent music cues for recurring locations -- I think early on (before I was told to knock it off) you identified that as a Twin Peaks riff, and that's certainly one place I got the idea from. Of course, in Twin Peaks it was pure style (since you could pretty readily recognize the location with your eyes), but in audio I think it might actually be valuable. I just haven't really heard any shows I listen to do it. So again, will I? I dunno yet.

[spiralsequin]

Yes, of course, you'll have more freedom on that one. :-)

And the location music is an interesting idea - I can't think of any audio shows that use it in that way, more for emotional background. The closest might be The Kingery, where Perry used music in certain locations - but that was source music from radios/speakers as far as I can remember.

It definitely sounds worth trying. Presumably it'd become as much a 'visual' cue as opening sfx once the audience has heard a couple of episodes. Could be v effective.

[spiralsequin]

ps. This is a discussion thread here on using transition music or fx - I found some tips useful for Red Sands. Might be of general interest to either of you?

http://www.audiodramatalk.com/archive/index.php/t-1136.html

[cmdrhobbes]

That's an interesting if older thread. It follows my general rule which is "whatever works".

I can't say I'm a big fan of locational music, or music specific to a character, when it's not varied. Bruce did that in Supergirl where individual characters had a theme song, and it really messed with the mood I think the scene was trying to set. For instance, they'd have a contemplative or dialog scene, and behind it was action music. It really threw me. Locational music in general I feel would do the same. The SFX should set the location, the music should set the mood, the dialog should set the plot/characters.