Music and Context
I use my video camera a lot. I shoot video on vacation, and sporting events, and all sorts of other places, and editing it down for upload to Facebook or YouTube. Often I’ll put some music underneath it; it serves as the glue that connects things together. The process goes something like this:
- Throw all clips that seem interesting onto the time line.
- Put all the clips in some sort of order. Sometimes this is chronological, other times I’ll try and make something more cohesive.
- Trim all the fat from each clip.
- Now that I know roughly how long the video will be, find a song that’s around that length and fits the mood of the piece.
- Throw the song into the time line, and futz with the video to make everything line up with the music.
It’s definitely not scientific, and it leads to some interesting choices at time. I was working on a video from a swim meet where I had edited 30 minutes of races down to around 6 minutes of video. I wanted some peppy music to go with, but there are very few six minute high energy songs in my collection. The song that does work: Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
The high energy parts are awesome, and the ballad parts go well with the beauty of swimming. Did not see that coming.
Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and often the context of the song is taken advantage of. For example songs can be used to evoke the memory of the era when they were popular. Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth has been used in movies from Panther to Forrest Gump to evoke the unrest of the late sixties and early seventies. However, the song was never about the chaos of the era, but instead about the closing of the Pandora’s Box club on Sunset Strip. It’s new context has made the song almost mythic, but it’s purely coincidence.
For filmmakers, it’s really easy to ride the coattails of a song’s context to improve the film. Romantic comedies can safely break out popular love songs, practically bashing the song’s context over the audience’s head in an attempt to create emotions.
More skillful filmmakers will play against the context, putting a song in a new light. Quentin Tarantino’s use of Blue Suede’s Hooked on a Feeling was just the beginning of masterful use of song, context, and cinema.
When I’m working, I try very hard to not choose a song ahead of time, because I like being surprised at how well music alters the work. Often I will specifically use songs by friend’s bands because I won’t have to worry about the context of the song altering my intent (or YouTube’s copyright detection). I’m often looking less at context and more at rhythm, feeling, and cohesiveness with the rest of the piece. What really surprises me is when including a song alters my context of it. The strongest example for me is Purple Balloon by The Roseline. It’s a song that I really love, and it’s wonderful to see the band play it live (they are a fantastic live act), but whenever I hear it I can only think of the two weeks I spent scanning photos for a video for my Grandfather’s funeral. My grandfather was a modest man, and I learned more about him in the two weeks after his death than I did in the 31 years prior. Like a song that reminds you of a breakup, I can’t listen to it anymore.
Talking Head’s Once in a Lifetime has been used to evoke the go-go eighties, but I associate it with Dallas in the early 2000′s, when I had their CD in my car. The only song I can think of that has no context would be Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’.
No matter what this song is played against, it will always be awesome.
Context is a powerful thing, and in many ways it’s something record companies fight to protect. Often a song’s context is based off the time it was popular, so it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. With the fall of radio, iTunes, Pandora, and everything else, is there really a way to connect a song to an era anymore? Do we even have a collective pop-culture consciousness?