An Intro To Film Scoring: Same Scene 5 Ways

An Intro To Film Scoring: Same Scene 5 Ways

Posted on June 8th, 2011 in Creative Commons, Film scoring, Music Tech Tips. I’ve been running a number of film scoring workshops lately and have been on the lookout for a video that shows the same scene with different styles of music which I can use as a starting point for discussing the effect of music in movies. So far, I’ve only been able to find this video on Youtube, which depicts a scene from the TV series Heroes with 12 different styles of music. It’s effective and the right idea, but it’s a little too violent for general school use! So, I decided to make my own video instead. I found an instructional film from the Prelinger Archives which shows children how to walk to school safely (Sid Davis Productions, 1964) and edited a small portion so that I was left with a 25 second clip. Then I chose a range of royalty-free music styles from Kevin Macleod’s Incompetech website where you can search by feel or by genre. Although it was hard to narrow the list down (and difficult to avoid choosing too many scary options!), I ended up with 5 contrasting styles of music – including an “odd one out”. I tested the video out yesterday during a workshop with a group of Grade 6 girls from Melbourne Girls Grammar School. They each took out a piece of paper and wrote down 2 or 3 words about the effect of each style on the movie, or how the music made them feel. They also correctly identified the odd one out! Then we moved on to creating soundtracks from scratch in GarageBand. The video is not perfect and I may do another version one day, but I think it will suffice for now .  Of course, you’re welcome to use it in your own classes if you think it’s useful.

An Intro to Film Scoring Training Course

Film scoring is a fantastic project for middle school students. If you’re interested in doing some film scoring with your students but you’re not sure where to start, you may like to take a look at the “Getting Started With Film Scoring” professional development course.