is surprisingly tasty. The maple doesn't overwhelm the vanilla...it's kind of like what you'd imagine vanilla waffles would taste like, in a soda. Also oddly reminiscent of French Toast Crunch cereal, a short-lived spinoff of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. If you live in LA, the sandwich shop "All About The Brea" next to Pink's Hot Dogs packs this stuff, and I recommend it.
That's not what I'm blogging about today, though. I'm here in my makeshift editing suite, rough cut standing at T=70:46. The last two minutes I've edited are backed by a single song without cuts, the longest music cue in the movie to date. For the most part I haven't used music under dialogue, but in some situations it works.
My thoughts on how to use music in Diamond Bar have changed as I've edited. Many sections I thought would go great with a certain song are now music-free, and some stretches I assumed would be nearly silent are full of music. Before I started, I had a whole playlist of 20 songs, and I assumed I know exactly where I wanted each of those songs to go. I worked for a long time on that playlist, too. I've been a music guy for much longer than a movie guy, and I had very strong ironclad opinions on how each of these lovingly chosen songs would fit in my project, and I've had to revise those opinions many times.
For one thing, putting music in a scene often forces you to lengthen it, sometimes disrupting how quickly you want to flow from one moment to the next. Either that, or put two bars of music in, which just feels weird. Other times the music I picked out was so strange as to be distracting. I don't want to be that guy who fills his indie film soundtrack with slow, strummy, earnest indie tunes, but it's so much easier to achieve a certain tone by using a simple, emotionally direct song. It's hard to match OOIOO or Mount Eerie to a scene in a sensical way, when it's easy to throw anything on top of The Shins or Band Of Horses and make it full of feeling.
Finally, and I've known this from the beginning, I don't have the budget to use 20 established songs in a movie, even from fairly underground artists. I've been talking to friends who are musicians about replacing some of the music cues I've chosen with original music that's similar in tone. It's cost-effective, and in a lot of situations having original cues tailored to the movie feels much more natural.
Still, in other situations I need the real thing. For one thing, the climax of Diamond Bar turns on a specific song that's referenced in the script. Even beyond that, sometimes the benefits of having a known, great song are more subtle. My two-minute cue is "Middle Cyclone" by Neko Case. It's singer-songwriter, girl-with-guitar indie of a type I've tried to avoid, and I could probably get a friend to make a reasonable fascimile of it. But I doubt the sequence will work as well with any other song. Neko's clear, ringing bellow, the warm reverb of the chorus, the vivid imagery, it all fits DB perfectly. There'll be parts of the movie with weirder music, and original music, and no music at all, but I'm convinced she's the right choice for this moment.
Listening to: Neko Case, Middle Cyclone (Natch.)
