Film school:Narrative Dialog Editing:Story of Penny and Eggbert:Film Score

An example for the course on Narrative Film Editing Planning the movie score Before we can create the film score, we need to understand how to create a film score. Because there are no words or action in this scene, the audience can only understand the scene by understanding the moods of the scene. Moods can only be produced by music. Therefore, we need to figure out how we can create the correct music for this scene. The story of Penny and Eggbert Intro: Penny & Egg Introduction Page #1: The story and script Page #2: The camera setups Pop Quiz: Penny & Egg Pop Quiz #1 Page #3: The dailies Page #4: The rough edit Page #5: "L-Cuts" Page #6: Creating "L-Cuts #1" Page #7: Creating "L-Cuts" #2 Pop Quiz: Penny & Egg Pop Quiz #2 Page #8: Planning the film score Page #9: How to insert narrative music Homework #1: Create the film score Homework #2: Editing the scene Note: Penny and Eggbert are 3D Poser models created by 3D Universe. For this lesson, these characters were posed and rendered with the free DAZ Studio.

Possible music for this movie The five sources of music There are five sources of music for a scene. 1. The melody line of the dialog. 2. Songs (pre-recorded by popular artists) 3. Background music 4. Narrative music 5. Sound effects

Eliminating the obvious No songs and no melody line music We cannot use songs to create the mood for this scene and we cannot get the mood from the melody line of tha ctors. Therefore, we can immediately elimiate these two options. 1. Pre-recorded songs Songs can only be used in a motion picture if there is just a single mood throughout the song. Songs don't change moods so you cannot use a song if there is more than one mood for the entire time the song is playing. This movie should have more than a single mood. Otherwise, it will be very dull indeed! Therefore, you cannot use a single song to create the mood for this scene. Your choices are to use multiple songs (not recommended) or find some other way to create the necessary moods for this scene. 2. Melody line of the dialog There are no words other than quacks and cheeps. And since there is no dialog, obviously, there is no music built into the dialog. A duck quacking and a penguin cheerping creates very little music as they speak. Note: The tonal range of the quacks and peeps does not vary in our example. However, in a Luney Toons cartoon, the peeps and quacks have a wide range of tonal pitch so they do create a kind of music in those movies. Unfortunately, our movie does not have expressive cartoon voices. What's left? Therefore, we are left with background music and narrative music. Which shall we use? And where?

Enhance the mood? Background music Background music is gentle music (never the same frequency as the dialog and without any percussion, complex structure, etc.) that can easily fit in the background. However, remember that the purpose of background music is to enhance the mood of this scene. Initially, that is a problem since initially, there is absolutely no mood in this scene. (Not with just a duck and a penguin making noise.)

How to add background music Adding background music We can add background music anywhere we want. Because background music does not interfer with the dialog, we are not limited to where we put background music. But background music will not exlain what is going on in this scene. We need music which will immediately explain to the audience what is happening in this scene. Therefore, we will need at least some narrative music which is music that acts like a narrator. So before we add any background music to enhance the mood of the scene, we need to add the narrative music. Later, we can come back and add additional music which will be background music.

Narrate this movie with music Narrative music The only option left is narrative music. For our scene, narrative music must be used to explain a scene. We must add narrative music because nothing else will do this. We have already eliminated all other possibilities.

Now to add narrative music It needs its own space Narrative music needs its own space. We can add narrative music in four places: 1. At the beginning of the scene before anyone says a peep (pun intended). 2. At the end of the scene after everyone is finished talking. 3. Inbetween the dialog. That is after Eggbert says his first lines and after Penny says her lines. In the third option, we must pull the dialog apart to leave a gap where we can insert narrative music. This is a very common way to insert narrative music into a scene and this is the ideal scene to practice on. For this scene, we can do all three.

How to insert narrative film music The next page Next I show you the steps for inserting narrative music in the middle of dialog. Click here to go to the next page. If you have any questions Your instructor for filmmaking classes is Robert Elliott. If you have any question, click here to email me.