James Dent wrote: > > David R. Busse wrote: > >... 8. DON'T USE POPULAR MUSIC. Music works best when it's something the > >audience probably has never heard before... > > > I agree with Mr. Busse's comments except perhaps for this one. I have > attended a number of Eastrail shows and enjoyed them very much. Some of > the presentations stick out in my mind because of the good use of > "popular" music. For example Steve Barry used "Electric Ave" by Eddie > Grant(?) on a sequence of shots of the Northeast Corridor. Another > presenter used the country song "Drive South" as a theme for his show on > Southeeastern railroading. Now whenever I hear either song I am fondly > reminded of those presentations. > > However< i would agree that this does have to be done carefully. > > Jim Dent
When a professor in editing class espoused this theory to me some 25 years ago it went something like this. Popular music conjures up all kinds of feelings, images, memories, etc. When you use popular music in an a/v or video presentation, sometimes the mind thinks "...hey, that's the sone that was playing all summer at the beach when I was 16..." or something like that. Strong mental images evoked by popular music sometimes detract from whatever image you're trying to present... I have often thought that use of a pupular song is a "cop out"...that the person didn't have the imagination nor the inclination to really find something better suited and less familiar... For example, I have a little tape/slide show on L&N 4-6-2 152 that I did 7 years ago. The music? Well, are you familiar with the heavy metal group "Iron Maiden?" Their producer, a Grammy award winning producer and songwriter named David Foster, has one hell of a CD called "The Symphony Sessions" featuring David on the piano backed up by the Vancouver Symphony. Best-known cut on that CD is a song called "Winter Games" that he wrote for us at ABC as the theme music to the 1988 Winter Olympics. Anyway, when I first heard the OTHER music on the CD...there was this one song of beautiful piano melody with strings behind. First time I heard it I said "...That's one hell of a mood cut..." and left it at that. Three months later I was in KY shooting 152 on a special photographer's charter and I couldn't get the song out of my mind. I will wager 99% of the free world has never heard this song, yet one friend in the TV business saw this slide show and commented that the music sounded like it was written for THIS slide show... BTW, I have met Foster on several occasions since then and he was ASTOUNDED when I told him what this particular song was used for in my slide show...he said he sure as heck wasn't thinking about trains, steam locos or Kentucky when he wrote the song. There's lots of music on motion picture sound tracks that makes good a/v background music... That's my 2 cents' worth... --DB --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1725
