Film editing/Editing dialog for music


{{Narrative dialog editing:Table of contents:Lesson 04 - Editing dialog for music instructional dvd}}

Lesson summary - Editing a scene for music

Who comes first? (Picture or music)

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The normal procedure in Hollywood is to edit your movie and then find a film composer to add a bit of music. This is totally wrong.
Two concerns
  • The most important thing to remember is music creates the mood for the scene.
  • The second thing to remember is you cannot have strong music when there is dialog.
So it is very difficult for a film composer to find room to add the necessary music.
The solution
The obvious solution is to edit the scene in a special way (by adding gaps in the dialog) so that the film composer has the room to add the necessary music.
Not always
This does not work always. But the Star Movie Shop[dead link]
has a disk which explains this using a simple demonstration of a scene with no gaps in the dialog and a scene were artificial gaps were added to the scene.
And if you have earned enough points, you can get the disk for free.

Ordering the Editing Workshop disks

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The "Blindman's Bluff Production" Editing Workshop DVD-Video

This lesson uses two scenes on a DVD-Video disk to demonstrate how scenes are editing for music You need to order the DVD-Video if you wish to take this lesson.

Currently, there are almost no scenes for practicing film scoring. Therefore, I use this disk for this lesson.

Order the disk

You can order the "Blindman's Bluff Production" Editing Workshop DVD-Video by going to the Star Movie Shop website. Currently, the price of this disk is $24 plus $3 shipping in the USA. They accept only PayPal.

Or you can pay with the points you have earned at Wikiversity.

Free offer

You can soon as you have 27 points, you can request the disk for free.

Note: You can earn enough points simply by doing an excellent job of Formatting the script and by taking the Pop Quiz for creating the thumbnail storyboards.

To contact the Star Movie Shop, you simply Click Here. Or visit their Star Movie Shop website. Or just contact your instructor (That's me.)

Refresher about narrative music

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What is narrative music?
Narrative music is music which is so expressive, strong, and powerful, the music acts like a narrator. When you have a narrator in a scene, you don't want the narrator talking and the actors talking at the same time. You will not be able to hear either one of them if they both talk at once.
The problem

When you film a scene, there is no music. The music is added later.

Therefore, when you film a scene, there are no gaps in the dailog for the narrative music. You have to create unnatural gaps in the conversation to add the narrative dialog.
Making room for narrative music
When you have dialog, there is no room for adding narrative music. you need music to help explain the mood of the scene. have a very special need for music yet you have additional limitations on the music.


Review: Background vs. Narrative music

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Background music
Background music is soft and gentle. You can put background music anywhere.
You don't need any special editing for this.
Narrative Music
You can add narrative music almost anywhere... except over dialog. Narrative music and dialog do not mix well. You have to keep them separate. You do this by creating a pause between the sentences of the actors and inserting the narrative music to fill up the gap.
Therefore, you must create these gaps when you edit the scene.

The next page

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The next page explains the contents of the disk

Contact your instructor

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