The rise of digital technology has given people access to equipment and software that 20 years ago was expensive and difficult to acquire. From a single computer, one person can now do the work of many. However, there is also an increased expectation that this one person is able to do high-quality work in multiple fields, with Editors expected to create cuts that are not just a picture and dialogue edit, but polished versions of a film including temp music, sound design, visual effects, and even grading. Unfortunately, this expectation is not just confined to Producers and Execs, but many Directors too.
What is Temp Music?
Temp Music is simply the music that you temporarily add to the cut during the edit, with the intention of replacing it with the work of the film’s Composer once the edit is finished. You may be getting cues through from the Composer as you work, but for the most part, and especially if you’re adding music early in the edit, you’ll be using existing cues, either from another movie, or from a sound library.
Responsibility for adding music usually falls on the Editor, although Assistant Editors will often be asked to source tracks, and perhaps add them to scenes. If a Music Editor is contracted to the project, it will be their responsibility to work with the Director and Editor (often with input from the Composer), to build a temp music soundtrack.
How to choose tracks
I will usually begin my search for temp music pretty early in the process. Often as early as my initial discussions with the Director. Tone is one of the key elements I will be looking to discuss with the Director even before the shoot, as that is absolutely crucial for me in figuring out what kind of film exists in the Director’s head.
I will specifically ask the Director what they’re thinking in terms of music, what they want the film to sound like, but also what they don’t want it to sound like. Most Directors will have already spent time thinking about music, even if they’ve not yet talked to a Composer, because music is a great way to communicate tone, not just to the Editor, but to everyone else involved in the production.
If it’s a genre film, we’ll usually also talk about which music elements commonly used in that genre we want to use, which we don’t want to use, and whether or not there are elements we want to try to bring in.
When building the Assembly, I’ll be looking for scenes where I feel I need to alter or heighten what’s already there in the scene. Perhaps we need more energy, or perhaps we need to add an element that isn’t really present in the scene. Have a watch for scenes and sequences in films and TV shows where people are walking into a location, or crossing a room, or we’re being introduced to a new location and imagine how bare and DULL that shot or sequence would have felt without music.
When selecting temp music I try and avoid cues that are too distinctive, whether familiar or built from memorable melody or instrumentation. This is why I have a “No Zimmer” rule. If I want to avoid distinctive cues, then using anything by Hans Zimmer risks creating problems. Instead, I’m usually looking for what you could call “generic”, and mainly for what I’d call “oh shit” cues.
Building suspense
Many mainstream films, and especially most genre films are largely built around suspense. We’re introduced to a character or set of characters who the filmmakers then use all sorts of tricks and techniques to encourage us to empathise and bond with, so that when we then put these characters in peril and danger, the audience will experience an emotional roller-coaster of worry and fear that they know (or at least hope), will eventually end with the characters finding safety.
This is the pact most mainstream films make with an audience. As an Editor, your job is of course to both help the audience form this bond with the characters, and to take everyone through the wringer once you’ve done so, and music is a key tool for doing so.
If you’ve helped the audience to get into a position where they fear for a character’s safety, then a number of the scenes and sequences in your film will be designed to put the characters in danger, opening the opportunity for suspense; the anxiety and fear that something bad is about to happen to the character.
As Hitchcock’s oft-quoted example goes, if in a film a bomb goes off under a table then there is a moment of shock and surprise, but if you see the bomb being placed under the table, if you know it could go off at any moment, and the characters at the table are oblivious to this danger, then a moment of surprise turns into a far longer spell of suspense.
It’s this nervous anticipation that audiences are looking for, and when searching for temp cues, I’m looking for music that creates this feeling for me. When I find a cue that makes me feel “oh shit, something bad is going to happen”, then that cue goes into my temp music folder ready for use at an opportune moment.
This cue is often quite slow and sparse, long and drawn out like the moment of suspense I’m going to attach it to. Sometimes it will build to something bigger, sometimes it will simply rise and fall, a near-miss for the characters. A lot of time it won’t be particularly melodic, more of a drone, perhaps a handful of notes on a string instrument.
Music Editing
Only rarely does a piece of music fit exactly into a scene, so the vast majority of the time you will need to edit the track to fit your scene. I’ll go more in-depth about music editing in another post, but the first thing to learn is that yes, you can and should chop a piece of music up in the same way you break up and re-arrange any other piece of video or audio.
The real challenge of building a temp score is that not only do you need to find tracks that work tonally for the scenes you’re using them in, but they also need to contain the right sections so that you can cut the track up and re-arrange to suit your needs.
You also ideally need to find tracks that feel like they could come from the same film, even though they’ve often come from multiple films. Plus, you need to do all this relatively quickly. There’s no point getting bogged down and spending days researching and building your temp score when it will all get removed sooner or later.
Music is often pretty formal and mathematical, so once you know how to break up a track into its constituent parts, it’s entirely possible to extend or shorten a track, repeat a section you want to play for longer, or remove parts that don’t work for your scene. You should always be using a piece of music to complement your scene, rather than making the scene fit the music, so I’d encourage you to treat music in the same way you would any other element.
Temp Love
One of the trickiest parts of building a temp score is that you risk falling into a trap that all editors, directors and producers fall into at some point, that of falling in love with a piece of music. Whether it’s something that fits the scene just perfectly, or it’s something that feels just right for the film, or maybe a track that you just love the sound or feel of, it’s easy to feel like you couldn’t possibly replace this particular track with anything else.
This is part of the reason why I try to stick to “generic” temp tracks and avoid anything particularly strong, or memorable, or distinctive. This is where the No Zimmer Rule comes from. Hans Zimmer is a great composer who produces very distinctive work, and as odd as it might seem, I never want to find a temp track that fits “perfectly”, because then how is our actual composer going to create something that does anything other than disappoint?
If you do end up in a situation where the director, or the producer says “oh, I love the track in the so-and-so scene”, I’d recommend subtly replacing it in order to give everyone a chance to get over losing the track before the composer comes onboard.
Adding Temp too early
There is a big debate about when you should and shouldn’t use temp music, or if you should even use temp music at all. As with many things, now that pretty much everything is digital, it’s so easy to grab a piece of music off YouTube and add it to your sequence. Which is one of the reasons why Directors and Producers expect it.
There are also well-known editors out there who make a point of saying they spend 16-hour days building full 5.1 mixes of their assembly, so there are increasingly high expectations of how rough a “rough cut” really is.
So the temptation then is to fill your assembly with temp music. At film school, we were explicitly told not to add temp music to the assembly, but now whenever I ask a Director if they’re looking for temp on the assembly, 9 times out of 10 they say “oh definitely”.
There is still a school of thought that you should hold off on adding music as long as possible, and that a scene should work well without music, so that you’re not just using the score to carry the scene. I wouldn’t disagree with those sentiments, but aside from the scenes that simply don’t work without music (montages for instance), I do feel that music is an important tool in the filmmakers’s arsenal and there are benefits to embracing its use during the edit.
The benefits of using temp music
Although it’s easy to fall in love with a track, building a temp score can also be useful in trying out different approaches to music, and to give you and the Director an idea of what might not work, helping the Director in their conversations with the Composer.
It’s also useful as a filmmaker to think about using the full palette of tools at your disposal. If you as an Editor actively avoid thinking about music and sound design because they’re the responsibility of other departments and you don’t want to get distracted from refining the strongest Picture Edit you can, are you leaving things on the table that could actually make the film stronger and more engaging?
As an editor, you’ll remove dialogue because a shot, or an expression on an actor’s face will communicate the same thing more succinctly and more gracefully, but there are also times that letting music or sound design replace the visual will lead to a stronger moment.
Like most things, balance is key when using temp music. In the same way that you don’t want to just drown a film in music, you will also benefit from finding those occasions when a judicious bit of score can transform a moment, either strengthening what’s already there, or twisting it into something new, different, and powerful.
Temp Music and Composers
Finding the right time for a composer to start on the project can be difficult too. Putting aside logistical and budget issues, there can be a wrong time to bring the composer on board. Again, there is a balance to tread between the advantages and disadvantages of doing it one way or the other.
Sometimes the composer will join the project pre-shoot, or early in the shoot. While this can lead to interesting experiments coming out of their work, it also means they are working to the film that the Director had imagined before they got on set, and films can change radically between script and edit. The tone may shift, the performance of the lead may be very different to what was expected, or the film could look radically different to all the references the composer was sent pre-shoot.
The edit is a period of discovery as much as anything. There comes a point at which everyone (especially the Director), needs to forget about what they were expecting the film to be, and embrace what’s actually in the material. If the composer is still working to an idea of what the film WAS, rather than what it now IS, they could be delivering material which is very wrong for the film, and that isn’t useful to anybody.
While a temp score can be a useful guide for the Composer, some will prefer not to hear the temp at all, instead making their own choices about where to use music and what to create. They will then discuss intention and placement with the Director (and often the Editor), during a Spotting Session. Whether they wish to hear the temp score or not, Composers will always ask for a version of the film or reel with all music stripped out, or at least with Dialogue and Effects panned to the Left stereo track, and music to the Right, allowing them to mute the isolated score.
Buying the Temp score
I tend to build my temp library from the scores of existing films in the expectation that it will all be replaced by a composer’s work, but one alternative approach is to bypass using a composer at all, and buy the tracks you need from a music library. This is more commonly done in factual TV, but as the quality of tracks available from music libraries improves, it’s becoming a more viable option in a creative sense.
A few years ago, I cut a 45 min scripted drama, where we took this exact approach, building the soundtrack from library music. I can’t honestly speak to budget and how cheap or expensive this method was, but from a creative point of view, it was an interesting and unusual way to build the score. There are obviously pros and cons for each method, but this allowed us to add instrumentation and arrangements that perhaps wouldn’t have been in our budget conventionally. It also allowed us to audition a lot of different tracks for the film that would have taken the composer weeks to write and rough out.
For more information on what an Editor is expected to do during an edit, check out the site’s Workflow category.