Keeley's AS Media Studies: Music in Film

Music, to me, is one of the single most important parts of a film. It helps to create to correct mood and emotion, and amplifies everything seen on screen. When we began editing or final project, I knew that I wanted to get the soundtrack of non- diegetic sound we used exactly right, as it could make our break everything that we had worked so hard to create and portray. In many films, the music is scored in conjunction with the film, sometimes even whilst the film is playing. The composer writes the music to fit what he see's on screen and what the directors vision is for the film or specific scene. A common feature used when writing programme music is the idea of character leitmotifs. These are short, memorable melodies that are played to represent one character, often interweaving into other themes or with other leitmotifs. A film usually also has it's own main theme that becomes an integral part of mood and plot. Take the Harry Potter film series as an example. The theme "Hedwig's Flight" by John Williams has now become iconic all over the world, symbolising all eight films even though he only composed for the first three.

In our film, whilst it will sadly not be possibly for us to compose a new track with a full symphony orchestra to match our opening, we do have many resources availiable to us. One of these is Moby, a website containing a great number of copyright free music tracks specifically designed for film. We want to try and capture Ariadne's sense of isolation, frustion and sadness in the music, whilst also not having it become too distracting from the voice over.

The videos on this post are all of music tracks that stand out for me from particular films, although there are many, many more I could put here.