I get kind of excited whenever we have someone really reputable come speak at DSU, particularly when that person has been nominated for a major award, like a Primetime Emmy.
Larry Groupe came and spoke to our pre-production class, and it was really cool listening to him talk about the process of film scoring. He primarily works on features, but he's done a lot of work on short films and documentaries as well. He conducts and mixes the music himself, along with the visual cues from an edit of a film, then hands it over to the director. Sometimes the director while ask for some things to be added or taken away here and there, and after those are all taken care of, the music will be put into the movie along with the dialogue and sound effects to be mixed.
What stuck out to me the most was that Larry was focused on the emotion of the song. That's what it's all about. The music for a scene should set the foundation of the purest emotions of what the subject feels, or what the director wants the audience to feel. He illustrated it by showing some clips on projects he's worked on, including the ridiculous comedy, "The Cable Guy."
Larry looks to composers such as Bernard Herrmann for really capturing the essence of emotion when it comes to film scoring. He mentioned a scene in "Psycho" where the entire scene is a 4-minute shot of a woman driving in the rain. Totally boring. But through the right score, Herrmann illustrated the mood and the character's thought process. Through music!
Kind of incredible, don't you think?
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