J. Anthony Allen explains how film composers should focus on the emotional intent of individual musical cues rather than the whole film. He outlines how to identify the desired audience feeling for each cue, communicate that intent with the director, and use music theory like chord progressions and genre conventions to translate emotions into sound.
Okay, what I want to talk about in this section is the connection between finding the emotion of the film and. Or the scene, let's say the scene that's more common, and music theory. So first of all, finding the right emotion for the scene. Now, the reason I'm saying scene rather than film is that the emotions change wildly in a film. And you might need to do something happy in one section, sad in the other, and all these other things. So we're really thinking about scene. And to use more proper lingo, we're. We're talking about the cue. C, U, E. The cue. A cue is each little musical snippet of sound. So, you know, you might have 100 cues in a film or you might have 10 cues in a film. In this film, I probably have closer to 10. There's not a ton of cues because this is a documentary. So there's one, there's one, there's one, there's one. And then this is one big one that's that big ending, waterfall scene. And then there's one more that's not in here, which is this closing track that runs on the credits. That was not a track of mine, so I didn't put it in there. So that's cue. So each cue has an emotional response that we want to get out of it. So one of the first things that you can do is kind of look at the cue and say, okay, what are we trying to get here? What do you want the audience to feel? And this is something that you'll want to communicate with the director and make sure that you're getting. Getting the right feel. I'll tell you a story later about some music I wrote that had the wrong feel in it, and it made for a kind of hilarious thing. But we'll talk about that in the next section when we talk about the process and how you work with the director. But what I'm talking about here in terms of finding the emotion is things like you watch the scene, and if it's a sad scene, you don't want a big techno track, Right? Like, these are, like, obvious things. So how can we find the emotional response other than talking to the director? You really just kind of have to watch it and feel it and work with it. But once you kind of get a sense for it, we can start to use music theory to put some notes to that emotion. Right. We have techniques for doing this. You know, we know that certain chord progressions are kind of sad, certain are kind of happy, certain chords are sad, certain chords are happy. Let's talk about that in the next video. A couple genre things that will pull from music theory.
