MUH112 Film Music Response
Rachel Daugherty
I thought the class discussion we had about the story boards was very interesting. I had never heard of this before and I definitely had no idea they hired cartoonist to make comic books before production started. That seems like a lot of work and money and I am still not sure if I understand how it helps. It looks like they could just make some sketches on their own to get some ideas of what they need for the movie instead of paying all that money for a cartoonist to make a comic book. I am still not sure how making a comic book helps them hire actors for the movie either. It looks like they would get that from reading the script and discerning the characters personalities and characteristics.
One thing I found really interesting in the reading was how the composers hired for the film score get paid in full weather their score is used or not. I guess this is good for the composer, because you get paid regardless, although it still would not be good to get your score rejected because it might make it harder to get other jobs. It is obviously really expensive for the film studios, however. I wonder how bad the score actually has to be for them to make the decision to pay double for music. And it seems like with all the interaction that most of the composers interviewed in the book seem have with the film producers, nothing would ever get far enough along to be rejected without the producer giving feedback and the composer changing the music to please the producer. Maybe some composers just like to work totally on their own. I also thought it was weird that considering how important producers think the music is, they use “what’s left” of the budget to pay for the music, sometimes limiting what can be done. I guess in these films with no money left for music they have to use the music the composer wrote whether they like it or not since they can not afford to pay someone else to write a whole new one.
When we watched The Jazz Singer I thought it was really weird how they had a little bit of dialogue in there, then the rest was silent. I was wondering why, if they could but dialogue in, did they not do it in the whole film. At first I thought maybe because it would take so long, but then they do all sorts of stuff that is complicated and takes a long time so that did not make sense. Then we talked about in class how they had to stop the background music to play the record with the dialogue and I decided the reason they did not do dialogue the whole movie is because they must not have figured out how to do the dialogue and the music at the same time. So they had to do one or the other. If they only did a little dialogue, the gaps in music would not be so bad, but a lot of dialogue would have made the movie really choppy with the music stopping and starting.
Another thing I noticed when we watched all the movies, and something I have noticed before, is that it seems like the actors movements are really fast and I always wondered why that was. Then I read in the book that they only ran sixteen frames per second back then, and now we run twenty-four frames per second, so it makes the movements faster.