Music Clearance – Now or Later…
June 11, 2008
The old saying, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” can apply to music clearance as well. I’ve been told many times that my music supervisor services are not needed until post. I guess when it comes to music clearance; we can say “What should come first, the music supervisor or post?” I hope to clearly unscramble this.
In the beginning, the screenwriter writes specific songs in the script. This is not a good idea. There should be a reference to music but nothing specific. Now the director reads the script and start forming his/her musical vision without considering the level of the music budget. Filming starts and the dailies are ready to view. In order to better realize their musical vision, the director has the editor drop in some of those pricey songs.
These songs now get tagged with a term called, “temp music.” Now everyone feels warm and cozy when they watch the scenes. It’s getting harder to imagine any other song for those scenes.
Now post comes along and I get the call to clear these expensive songs with a budget that’s too small to cover one song let alone all of the songs. All the hard work that went in to editing around these wonderful and expensive songs will have to start all over when reality forces the need for replacement songs.
I now proceed with reluctance as I already know the outcome. In these situations, I always make a point to include a disclaimer in the license request forms when I submit them. I let the licensing reps know that I’ve already informed the director and producers that the music budget is not sufficient enough to cover the potential licensing fees. I have a professional reputation to uphold and I don’t want any licensing rep to think that I’m an inexperience music supervisor.
Once I get the quotes back from the publisher and record labels, I report back to the director and producers and sadly inform them that the license fee for the “big” songs have exceed the entire production budget.
Had I come on board in pre-production and was given a copy of the script and a list of the songs that had already been selected, I could have given my professional insight on the availability to obtain the rights to these songs. In the early stages of production, this gives enough time to find a replacement song that is more affordable.
Many films make it through the festival circuit with un-cleared music. It’s a sad and unfortunate reality. The festival producers really do nothing about it and the filmmakers know it. The day they get the call from a distributor who is interested in their film, is the day they panic and call a music supervisor.
Having a distributor interested in your film is an awesome accomplishment. Everyone is excited and celebrating. The party ends when the distributor asks for the deliverables and there are no signed license agreements and no cue sheet. It’s back to the drawing board with no money in the music budget and a tight deadline to meet. The only thing that I can do is proceed and do my best to negotiate with the music publishers and record labels and hope that the producers can raise enough money to cover the licensing fees and the cost to re-edit the film with replacement songs.
If you are a filmmaker in the situation that I’ve written about above, I strongly recommend that you revisit your music choices and budget. If you have songs in your film that you’ve heard on the radio or even oldies that your parents used to listen to, I would get a music supervisor involved to help you get a realistic financial picture of your impending licensing fees.
I guess it’s clear to say that the music supervisor should come before post. Unfortunately, the film community will continue to wait until post and play with big songs and a very small music budget.
I read your blog a few days ago and then today read an article discussing similar issues with “temp” music I thought you might find interesting…
(excerpt from an article called Minding Their Beats and Cues by Michael Kunkes, http://www.editorsguild.com/v2/magazine/archives/0907/features_article05.htm)
Temp Love…and Hate
Along with championing the score, the music editor’s most important function is to oversee the creation of the temp dub, which is often, as Lowry claims, a work of brilliance in itself––although that brilliance rarely gets to appear on screen. The temp dub began to appear in the early to mid-1980s as a way of showing a rough work in progress to a director or exhibitor, but rarely to an audience.
In recent years, however, driven by precision audio technology such as ProTools, the emergence of huge music libraries, and shortened post-production schedules, the temp dub has achieved an importance today that can be a do-or-die situation for the composer, the film, or both. It’s a situation that has come to be known as “Temp Love.”
Angie Rubin, left, Ken Karman and Michael Dittrick at Dittrick’s MICDI facility in Burbank, California. Photo by Gregory Schwartz
Modern Music’s Ken Karman has been a feature film music editor since 1979. Associated with leading composers such as Newman, Alan Silvestri, James Horner and Danny Elfman, Karman agrees that the purpose of the temp dub hasn’t changed, only the expectations associated with the process. “Directors, producers and studios want to present their films in the best possible light,” he says. “With digital technology, editors are able to refine the temp music in a way that was not possible when I started in the business, and expectations have risen with our ability to do things like changing a cue’s tempo and pitch and to combine disparate pieces of music in a very precise way.”
Karman calls the temp a double-edged sword. “For better or for worse, temp dubs have become an integral part of modern post-production. While they do allow directors more time to explore various musical directions, they often have the effect of limiting a composer’s opportunity to approach the music with a fresh perspective. It’s not unusual for a composer to find himself in the position of having to compete with his own work from previous films. The process engenders a kind of musical inbreeding.”
While he acknowledges the importance of the temp, Hall does feel that it sometimes serves only to mask a director’s insecurities. “That’s only human nature, but sometimes the overuse of music becomes only a background and adds no emotion, ” he says.
“Music should start for a specific reason, play a point of view or an emotion, and then get the hell out, not drawing the audience’s attention. Music never saved bad acting, and it never saved a bad scene either.”
Michael Dittrick, like his mentor Hall, came out of the studio system, employed at Universal, Fox and Warner Bros. When the studios disbanded their music editorial departments in the mid-1980s, Dittrick first became a contract worker. Then, he started his own company, MICDI Productions, Inc. in 1987, through which he has worked on both TV series (Desperate Housewives, American Family, Boston Public) and features (Elektra, Halloween: Resurrection, The Princess Bride). He feels that temp love is a problem that is only going to get worse.
“It’s become common for music editors to do what they can to blow away the director,” says Dittrick. “They usually have more hands-on time to work closely with the director on a scene than the composer does, and a larger sound palette because they can choose anything in the world from their music libraries without having to clear it.” That’s where the challenges start, he feels.
“The producer or director goes into a spotting session with the composer, who will be told, ‘We really love this cue, can you just rip it?’” Dittrick continues. “Technology is going to allow the director and the picture editor to put more music in; in fact, it has come to be expected. It’s not uncommon for us to clean up OMF files from the Avid and take them to the dubbing stage, but it’s also becoming common for the picture editor to turn the music over to the sound department, who loads it into ProControl and creates a 5.1 mix that then becomes part of the temp dub for a test screening. It’s happening more and more.”
Adds Bernstein, “The temp dub has kind of become the tool by which directors sometimes take over ownership of the score. They will often approve the music for the temp and hold the composer against that. They will tell the composer, ‘Hey, I like the temp because it does this or that,’ so even if they don’t have the musical vocabulary to describe what they want, they can pull out some other piece of music and say, ‘Make it do that,’ which is really sad, especially on a low-budget movie where a composer is doing it just for the creative freedom.”
Some music editors, like Angie Rubin (Alpha Dog, Mrs. Harris, Rendition), see the temp in a more positive light. “I really do see the temp as a warm-up for the final mix,” she says. “Depending on how many temps there are––and there can be several––you get to fine tune musical ideas as you go. I also think it makes the process more of a team effort. Sound and music get to really see, hear, feel and know what each department is up to.”
Rubin adds that she has even begun asking that sound and music editors be together at the spotting sessions that help make up the temp. “I just like the idea of working together over weeks and months,” she explains. “Sound helping picture and picture helping sound; a true give and take. That way, we all can complement each other, and not overpower or try to out-do each other at our own sessions.”
At the same time that the temp dub is becoming more important, it is getting less and less time and resources devoted to it, Lowry feels. “Even if we didn’t have previews, I think films would benefit from the temp process because it’s like workshopping,” she says. “It’s a way for a team of people to get to know the film and each other and figure out what would best serve the end product.”