The Imperfect Connection Between Characters, Storylines, and Your Music
What makes a filmmaker see their characters when they hear your music?
The basic concept is simple: people have a personality and music conveys a personality. The characters in a show have bold parts of their personality which are apparent immediately in their actions, plot lines, fashion, dialog, and attitude. They also have nuances in their personality that are subtle and require more attention to pick up by an audience. These are often the details that writers use to create depth or deception in the arc of a story across a series.
Music shares those same attributes. There are bold sounds, chords, rhythms, and lyrical messages that state the obvious message. There are also subtle details, imperfections, harmonic dissonance, unique choices in lyrical approach, metaphors, tonal temperatures, and slight tempo shifts. This is where the depth of connection takes place through the eyes of the filmmaker.
The characters in a plot are not perfect. They are rife with human imperfection, personality flaws, ulterior motives, broken pasts, greed, and misguided desires. If we put a cast-of-characters together that all looked, and acted like perfect model citizens, there wouldn’t be villains, heroes, conflict or resolution. Everything would just be great.
It’s the subtle things in the music that represent the attitudes, relationships, and storylines. It’s the flaws in music that connect to the imperfections in the characters. It’s the odd rhythm, the slight tempo change, the uncomfortable rub between a chord and the melody, or some unusual instrumentation that captures the nuance of the story, the escalating pulse of the scene, or the motives of it’s characters both good and bad. This is where the match between music and picture is made.
These concepts apply to all genres of music, and are true for both diegetic and non-diegetic music uses in a production. They are paramount to how a filmmaker hears your music, and intrinsically relates it to their show. This is the connection that I describe in the e-book Getting Started in Music To Picture.
So, today's lesson is this: Embrace the flaws, exaggerate the human elements, seek out the underlying emotional core, explore musical ideas that represent fallibility, and by all means break the traditional rules when it comes to writing music for sync placements. Your music will begin to connect to the personality of characters in the story and the imperfection in their lives. This is what makes a filmmaker see their characters when they hear your music.
