Final Words

My film class is over, save for the final exam, and I leave feeling like I've actually learned something this time around. Being a business student doesn't give me enough opportunities to immerse myself in the arts, and I feel as though I milked this class for all it's worth. I love film, and this was the perfect class to take to expand my knowledge on something I know little about.

I've taken film classes before, but they were mostly strictly lectures. We watched a few clips here and there, but we learned theory and never had the chance to apply what we learned. Not in this class. I learned, and I got the chance to apply what I learned, to relate theories to films, to experience the soundtrack of a movie on a personal level, one on one, with no one telling me how to feel but me.

Sound is the aspect of film I always felt the least comfortable with, but that's no longer the case. Not only do I know a bit about the history of film, I'm able to identify what the sound is doing and why it's doing such a thing. I know the difference between parallel sounds and synergistic sounds, I know how the sounds in a film are rarely "natural" sounds, I understand now that the most important sound to capture in the filmmaking process is the voice. Everything else can be added in later. There's an art to sound editing, and I feel like I've had my first glimpse into it. I used to think if I were ever to become a filmmaker, that I would be so completely lost when it came time to scoring the film. Not anymore. I'm no composer, but at least I understand the basics behind sound in film, and I'm so grateful for that. Being able to understand the different elements, being able to assign meaning to different moments of sound in film is wonderful.

And the best part of it all is that I learned (I'll admit, at the beginning of the course it was harder than I thought it would be) to not analyze a film from the get-go. I'm able to sit back and watch a film without thinking too much about the sound. But, the beauty of it is that now I'm able to look back on the soundtrack of the film after I've finished it and I'm able to notice the times the sound had an impact on me. I can point out different aspects of the soundtrack that I liked, what worked and what didn't, why the sound, whether diagetic or non-diagetic made me feel one way or another. And I love being able to do that.

So thank you to my Movie Soundtrack professor, I'm so grateful for having had the opportunity to learn something I never thought I would have the chance to learn. This is a course full of material I will be using for the rest of my life.

The Big Chill

I always try to watch at least one movie a week. One sounds like such a small number, but with school and work and life, there are times where I never even meet that goal. The one movie that I did watch, recently, was The Big Chill. And I was amazed at how incredible the soundtrack was.

The soundtrack of the film was comprised of songs Lawrence Kasdan's wife found — songs that were all the rage the days the group of friends were in college.

I'm a big fan of 60s and 70s music and a smile would burst onto my face every time I heard a new song. In an interview with Meg Kasdan (Lawrence's wife), she explained how she was given the job of listening to all the main songs of the late 60s and early 70s — songs that would have defined the lives of the characters while in college — and figuring out which ones to use in the film. According to her, there were some songs that she (and her husband) knew would fit perfectly with a scene, to heighten the audience's emotions, but there were also moments that took a lot of time to find the perfect song.

What I liked about the soundtrack was that I knew all of the songs. As much as I enjoy music made specifically for a film, as it gives each scene a unique sound, the pop songs in The Big Chill worked, well. They felt seamless with the emotions presented and the relationships between the characters. Meg Kasdan did a fabulous job at choosing songs, and the rest of the sound editing team did a stupendous job at weaving them in and out of the scenes. Big congrats to them, I couldn't get over how amazing it was and wouldn't stop mentioning it to my mom (who also loves the film) for days.