Press release April 2002

Members of the Surrey Border Film & Video Makers Club were held in fascination by this month’s talk by Christine Collins, who had braved the M25 from Potters Bar, to share her experiences of the professional film business. She illustrated her talk with video clips, which dramatically demonstrated how the appropriate music can bring videos vividly to life.

Christine showed how the added dimension of mood music, synchronised with the action, stimulates a more complete immersion in the emotions of the topic and so brings a film to life. This is not just a matter of finding a piece of music and then playing it continuously throughout the movie but of choosing the music for each particular scene to convey the type of action that is going on.

In commercial movies the music is commissioned, although this is hardly a realistic proposition for the amateur. Use of music with a heavy beat can be used to facilitate cuts from shot to shot in time with the beat, and examples were also demonstrated. Contrary to what we sometimes see on television, the background music and sounds should not mask the actors’ words.

Many of us now use camcorders for capturing pictures of holidays, the children, birthdays etc, but the intrusion of background noise over the sound we wish to record is quite a problem. This is most obvious at parties or in other situations where there are many people milling around. Particularly frustrating is the discovery of the problem only after the event, something which happens all too often. It seems as if we humans can ignore background hubbub while camcorders seem to accentuate it. Christine pointed out ways of overcoming these problems, including microphones clipped on the speaker, the use of radio microphones and also highly directional microphones. Also discussed were the huge woolly microphones sometimes seen in television reporters hands for outside interviews.

Before her visit Christine had challenged members to provide a difficult and unseen piece of video to which she would try to add appropriate music to bring it to life. The video provided was of an excavator clearing a building site – an unexciting topic at the best of times. She rose to the challenge, and within minutes and a quick flip through her CD collection, she deftly found suitable tracks which she then played in synchronism with the video to dramatically change it into one of considerable audience appeal.

Members of the audience left armed with the knowledge of how to choose the right music to turn their future work into masterpieces.