Moving Images, Understanding Media

96 Moving Images: Making Movies, Understanding Media

Alfred Hitchcock, Henry Mancini and Blake Edwards, John Williams and

Steven Spielberg, Mark Mothersbaugh and Wes Anderson, Danny Elfman

and Tim Burton, or Joe Hisaishi and Hayao Miyazaki.

It is also important to note the eff ect of music on continuity and pace.

Music greatly infl uences the quality of continuity of a fi lm and can help

tremendously in smoothing out rough edges or putting accent marks on

visual cues in the fi lm’s continuity. Additionally, music can have a tremendous

eff ect on the tempo of a fi lm. In particular, the addition of music to the

scene can give the impression of enhancing the speed of a scene without

a single frame cut from the picture, thus adding to its energy and possible

emotional impact.

Songs in the Scene

When refl ecting on the use of music in fi lm, there is a key question to consider:

is the music heard or created by the people on the screen, or is it not? If the

music is actually present during the scene, such as played on a radio or actually

performed by the characters, it is useful and oft en necessary to determine or

create the actual tracks in advance. In fact, the fi rst famous sound fi lm, Th e

Jazz Singer, was a musical, and one of the most signifi cant uses of music in

fi lms is in the integration of musical performance and dance in such fi lms

as On the Town, Th e Band Wagon, Funny Face, Th e Sound of Music, Pride &

Prejudice, Dreamgirls, and Sweeney Todd, among many others.

Th e choice of previously recorded music is the other primary musical

possibility available to fi lmmakers. In contemporary cinema, the most

obvious example is the use of popular songs. Filmmakers frequently began

to embed contemporary songs into the soundtrack of fi lms commonly by the

Figure 3-15 The

collaborative process in

the recording studio: at the

podium, actress and singer

Julie Andrews, composer

Henry Mancini, director

Blake Edwards. (Courtesy of

Th e Henry Mancini Estate)

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