When a rough scene is finished, it is exhilarating. With About The Girl, each new scene brought a renewed interest to the process and inspired us to keep working through the often tedious editing process. Uploading footage, from all those different angles we captured, took a great deal of time. Stringing it all together, even more. Still, with each new scene, we were closer to our goal. We were happy with our progress, but there was something missing.
We were missing music. As a quick patch solution, we added some temp tracks added into the scenes, stuff that we had lying around in iTunes, and they finally started clicking the way we had imagined. The problem was, using popular music can be a very costly endeavor and this was no-budget film making.
When I first sat down to write About The Girl, even in the early noir version, the opening scene was always the same slow reveal of a beautiful dead girl in a creek. I had a song in mind for that scene and I decided to rekindle an old friendship to see if it might work. In the end, my good friend Mark Bradford was happy to supply not only Pete's Dam, the song that I had envisioned for that opening scene, but also a full soundtrack to our film under the guise of his recording name punch me hard. Do yourself a favour and visit that link.
The planning process is tiring workMark Bradford, and sometime collaborator Jeff Addison
There is no denying that the music of punch me hard resulted in a more powerful story than even I had imagined. A perfect example is the final scene, as the three weary friends walk out to the bridge and read the note. We had a song in place, one that had become inextricably linked to the scene thanks to repeat viewings and refinements to the scene, but when we replaced it with happy new year, Mark's punch me hard effort, something surprising happened. The scene suddenly felt complete. Mark's beautiful song increased the melancholy, beauty, and perhaps most surprisingly, the hope of our closing scene. Hope was not something we had envisioned for the closing moments of our film, but thanks to Mark's incredible talents, we realized that hope was something that had always been there: it just needed the right cue to make itself known.
Music can change your life, and it can change your movie too. Many of the scenes that we had grown accustomed to with temp tracks, took on subtle new characteristics and sometimes, a refined emotional resonance with Mark's input. I have always respected Mark as a musician and a friend, and that is more true than ever after collaborating with him on our first film. Mark's music provided our film with a strong thematic through line and served to reinforce not just the action on screen, but the emotional journey our characters had taken. I look forward to working with him again in the future. He is a talented musician first and foremost, but he also provided us with the perfect direction as to how his songs should be incorporated. That is a totally different skill set. Collaboration is the key to success for no-budget film making and if this is something you are going to attempt, you should make sure you surround yourself with talented artists. It will make your experience all the more pleasant.
You should really take a minute to visit the link above and check out some ofthe music on the punch me hard site, including Happy New Year, which closed out our film. You'll be glad you did.
Next time: How to premiere your movie (unofficially), with no-budget.
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