No, there's no reason you should know his face ... but you probably know his work. This is Danny Elfman whose music graces such diverse movies as Batman, Dick Tracy, Beetlejuice, Sommersby, Edward Scissorhands, Good Will Hunting and even tv's The Simpsons. He has also contributed songs to scores more movies. He is a modest man, full of enthusiasm for the cinema. His first feature was Pee Wee's Big Adventure on which he commented: "Although I was absolutely terrified at first, by the end of the project I knew I was addicted to film music for life."

If you delve in the darker recesses of a large record shop you can buy an oddly titled CD of Elfman's music - and pretty strange listening it makes. To understand why it is odd may take a moment ...

Imagine listening to an Irish story-teller by the fire in a dark country pub.  Your pleasure is as much from the cosiness, comfort and drink as the story.  The burr of the voice, the glint of an eye, the occasional shifting of limbs - all contribute to the sensation. Enjoying a good movie is similar.  The story and pictures are important but it is all the other elements which complement it and make it special.

Clutching an expensive camera, worrying about losing light, framing shots and so on makes it all too easy to forget that movies are at least as much about sound as vision.  On location you may catch some usable sound material but for the most part you create the soundtrack at home in post-production.

Video makes it simple to record lip-synch dialogue but often relatively little of your soundtrack will be talk.  (A movie that depends on solid dialogue is a radio play that got lost.)  Most of it will be "atmosphere", occasional spot sound-effects and music.  The use of "atmosphere" - background noise suggestive of the location - and handling of sound-effects will be covered on other web pages in due course. (Keep checking!)

Background Music

For now we are concerned with adding music to your soundtrack. Like the soft accent of the story-teller this cradles your audience, enhances their experience - and papers over the necessary cracks in reality.  (You don't shoot "real-time" do you?  Do your characters sleep on screen for eight hours?  Do you show every step of their walk from scene to scene?  Hide those gaps with sounds!)

To sound posh you need to know that music in the background, with no visible source, is termed extra-diegetic. Whereas if you can see the source - e.g. a jazz band in shot it is diegetic.

The aim is to choose music which either fits so snugly that people are hardly aware of it - or something which catches their attention and becomes part of the action. (Think of  Lara's Theme in Dr. Zhivago or the punctuating blasts of rock in Pulp Fiction.)

And now - at last - we come to the reason why film music often sounds odd on its own.  Much of it is designed to sit in the background, influencing our emotions but not drawing attention to itself.  Composing it is a specialised business.

Ideally you should seek out a musician and work with her or him to create an original music score for your film.  Be thankful you do not need to find an orchestra to play it: in this age of synthesizers "one man in 3/4 time can play many parts. " What is right or wrong for a scene depends on both the emotions at that point in the story and in the larger scheme of the movie.  If you want any tricks plan them beforehand: think of Psycho's shower scene ... where you expect a human scream you get Herrmann's shrieking strings.  They can work but are tricky to pull off.

If you cannot find a musician - and do not give up easily, there are students, bored music teachers and ex-concert performers all over the place who would love the challenge - then either use computer-generated music or pre-recorded CDs.

There are now several computer programs which allow even the least musical of us to assemble "pleasant noises", we may cover them in future. There is a mass of commercial music which can be used with an IAC licence and sometimes with Musicians Union agreement. But the mainstay of many productions is music specially produced for use on stage and screen.

Such CDs are rarely "copyright free".  Most producers retain their ownership rights in the material but offer a free licence to use it in amateur production.  There are many suppliers of such music ranging from long-standing companies to one-man bands. (No, not literally a bloke with a bass drum on his back, banjo in his hands, harmonica at his mouth, cymbals on his knees and marracas ... well, don't ask!)

It is worth checking all their material but you have to "listen with your eyes" - because this is not music for the concert hall.  Much of it is intended to slip like Polyfilla into the cinematic cracks.  It is the crackling peat fire beside the storyteller, the inner glow of Jamiesons in your stomach ... the complement which makes a movie experience into a moving experience.

And we are back to Danny Elfman's strange sounding music.  Quirky, startling, lyrical and always unexpected it is out-of-place on a disc (though I treasure my copy) and belongs on a soundtrack.  Its title: Music for a Darkened Theatre.

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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