Apologies for the missing blog post last week as I was recovering from what I can only describe as the perfect storm of a chest infection and a bit of a cold. I'm feeling a bit better now so I'm coming back with a bang or at least a noisy whimper.
I'm sure you've all seen a TV show or film that uses a song so well that it skyrockets both the TV show/film/video game and that song's popularity for a few days on social media. Maybe it was used to choreograph a fight scene, maybe it enhanced a running gag or maybe it simply played in the background in place of unnecessary dialogue during a plot-advancing montage.
Either way, there are ways to go about choosing a great song to enhance a moment and hopefully this blog post will teach you some of those ways...or, at the very least, make it look like I know how to teach you those ways.
1. Know Your Moment
It should go without saying but it's important to make sure you understand the emotion behind your moment. Once you know whether you want to make the audience laugh, cry or sit with eyes transfixed on the screen, it'll be a lot easier to choose the right song. If you want to make a moment funnier, you're probably better off choosing a song with context-appropriate lyrics. If you want to make a moment emotional, choose a song that doesn't overshadow the drama on-screen. If you want to make a fight scene awesome, choose a Hard Rock song. Any Hard Rock song, you probably won't fuck it up.
2. Choreography
Whatever's happening on screen has to match up with the song you choose. I'm not saying it needs to hit each literal beat like the "Don't Stop Me Now" scene in Shaun Of The Dead but if you're doing a car chase, a fast-paced 4/4 song is the most sensible option and if things are happening in slow motion, you want a track with a BPM below 100. I suppose those points would apply to the first point more than this one so let's talk more about ACTUAL choreography.
If you're starting off calm and building up to something explosive (whether it's a fight, death or moment of betrayal), you're better off finding a song that syncs up musically to what's happening on screen, even if it means a bit of creative editing. Sure, it's hardly an inspired move but if you pick the right song, it'll sound and look awesome. If you know and love your music, you'll find it easy to pair the rhythm of a song to the rhythm of what's happening on screen.
3. Well Known Or Not Well Known?
Let's say you've got your moment sorted out and just need to decide which song to play over it. You've narrowed it down to two perfect choices; one of them is relatively unknown but fits the scene perfectly, the other is a household track that also fits perfectly but will probably cost more to license and may have been used way better in a different show. Well, each case is unique but if the song has been used in an iconic scene(s) before then you're probably better off using something different and creating a brand new moment with a song that people will mostly associate with your scene.
At the same time, sometimes moments are elevated because the song is well known but fits perfectly with what's happening too. I remember the TV show Supernatural using "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" during a scene where a jogger is killed by a Reaper. The great thing about using that track was that the song's riff is well known enough for the average person to instantly connect the dots after hearing it, meaning they could let the music do the talking whilst the action happens on screen. As I said, each case is different but it's definitely worth researching whether or not people have probably already made psychological connections between a song and a great scene.
4. Don't Oversaturate
If you get one awesome moment thanks to the perfect use of a song, you've done something right. If you get two in one episode/film/game, you'll be lucky. Any more than that is an extreme rarity with good reason. Having one or two memorable music moments means your work is more focused and the moment is one of the highlights of the production, whereas having several in a short space likely means each moment is decent but none truly memorable in the grand scheme of things.
You can compare it to a finite quantity of awesome that each episode or whatever is allowed and the more you spread it out through moments attempting to be memorable, you more diluted each moment will become. Obviously you want to make your production memorable in more than one way but if you try to pack it full of Wayne's World "Bohemian Rhapsody" clips, you risk bombarding the viewer with too much.
5. Context Is Everything
This is essentially a summary of the previous points all rolled up into one final observation. If there's a creative way you can use a song's title/chorus to mean something other than what the songwriter intended, that can potentially create an awesome moment. Once you've picked your song, listen to the lyrics and see if they also link to what's happening in the episode/film/game. If not, maybe you'd be better finding another song or maybe you need to think about which part of the song to emphasise. Finally, is the audience going to have any kind of negative connotation with hearing that section of music in that way? If not, sounds like you have the makings of a memorable music moment!
If I don't post anything tomorrow, I'll aim to get two posts done next week although one will almost certainly be video game related.
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