Finding Film Scenes

Does anyone know of any means by which someone could find a good film scene without the music in the background?

there are none unless you work in post production. My advice: Give up the search and search for movies with little or no music in it

What we used to do is take the scene, mute it and add whatever ontop and use subtitles for whatever anyone is saying. Some scenes don't even have dialogue.

That doesn't work well. See when writing to picture, you have to add the dialogue to the formula. Where in the frequency spectre it is, how the pacing an rhythm of the dialogue is, and learn to treat it like an instrument. Subtitles can't do that for you.

Scenes without dialog are great. Scenes without music are better. Nature documentaries are better, because composers get the movie without ANY audio. Everything is dubbed and no sound from the nature is actually captured - this is the way they did it for the BBC thing.

There are a lot of movies with practically no music - the bird movie from hitchcock for example - where directors or producers have chosen not to put music in as a concept.

I really don't know why he's asking it for so I'm assuming it's for practice. The point is, it works just fine and you can still tell how different it'd be with the actual dialogue (since you have both versions.)

As for treating it like an instrument, that's sort of out of nowhere. Most of how it's handled are treating certain things as cues, etc and the rest is simply the volume so on so that the dialogue doesn't get eaten up by the music. Plus considering how film music is, there are very specific set of things for each type of scene, it's not like it matters what they're really saying or how unless the music is supposed to react to it (but even then, it's really only a cue.) It's not like different trains where what's spoken has an analog in the music, that's very rare (but an interesting idea nonetheless and possibly the only thing you REALLY can't do without dialogue at all.)

Which is precisely why something like 2001 worked fine even if the music in it was not written for the film itself. It really depends and it's hard to generalize like that.

But in any case, all of it is good exercise.

Generally movies that don't have music, don't NEED music. There's a reason it's not there, and trying to write to picture will be nearly impossible.

Muting the audio track is a generally accepted way of practicing scoring to picture. Quite a few people here in LA have gotten jobs sending out demos where they've muted the audio track of studio films/tv shows. (just as long as that's not your entire demo). If you have a bit of time and know-how, you can also take a DVD and rip the audio from the front two speakers, or the center speaker, of the surround mix. Dfx are usually included in front, while music is usually mixed to the back. This way won't be perfectly clean, and depending on the mix you'll be getting some bleed through from the music, but you can also try to isolate certain frequencies that correspond to dialogue, which will cut down on the bleed through.

You'll need some way to rip the video from the DVD, a program to rip the surround track from the audio portion of the DVD and separate it into its separate mono streams, and a program to edit everything all back together.

I used to practice scoring films this way, I'm not sure about the legality of posting on youtube or whatever, so that's up to you.

Maybe it's fine if it's only for education purposes (fair use??) I don't know.

Maybe it's fine if it's only for education purposes (fair use??) I don't know.

I'm pretty sure it should be ok, as long as you put a disclaimer at the beginning telling everyone where ownership stands. I posted something I rescored from Spiderman on youtube a few years ago and it hasn't been taken down yet.

As for treating it like an instrument, that's sort of out of nowhere. Most of how it's handled are treating certain things as cues, etc and the rest is simply the volume so on so that the dialogue doesn't get eaten up by the music.

It's not out of nowhere, but out of great film composers experience.... And the way you can tell a composer is good is generally how he handles dialogue. Simply by lowering the volume or actually writing around the dialogue.

2001 was just Kubrick falling in love with his temp score... that's it. Reason why it worked was that his music editor did a great job.

But heck for practice, you can take a chapter from a great book and try to write to that emotion.

Generally movies that don't have music, don't NEED music. There's a reason it's not there, and trying to write to picture will be nearly impossible.

That's a truth with modifications. The birds was Hitchcock trying out a new concept in response to wall-to-wall tapestry music. Herrmann strongly disagreed with the decision of no music at all of course. Cast Away was also about the concept of Tom Hanks alone on an island, but it makes perfect sense to add music.

Hi.

Thanks so much for the replies.

This IS just for practice. It's just that I'd seen some videos on youtube with just music and the dialogue dubbed out, so I wondered whether there where any clips that did the reverse.

I think I should probably look for scenes without dialogue. Kissing scenes, fighting scenes (where I can dubb in some gunshots/punches/whatever the scene needs.

But again, thanks SO much for all your help. :)

It's not out of nowhere, but out of great film composers experience.... And the way you can tell a composer is good is generally how he handles dialogue. Simply by lowering the volume or actually writing around the dialogue.

2001 was just Kubrick falling in love with his temp score... that's it. Reason why it worked was that his music editor did a great job.

Then maybe the Shining would be a better example if we're talking about Kubrick, then? Look at the scene with the bat which has the Penderecki backing.

Either way, as for how you can tell a composer is "good" or not, I really don't think dialogue is that much of a big deal. People aren't going to be listening to the music nearly as attentively since they have to hear the actual dialogue so whatever you put in there is mostly going to go unnoticed unless it draws attention to itself (and away from the dialogue.) Either way, all of it could as well be considered writing around the dialogue because otherwise it's just taking the music out of the scene. I doubt any composer would write over the dialogue so that he HAS to lower the volume, so what I mean is that it's written so that it is softer in segments where the dialogue shows up (as to not distract.) Maybe it's not exactly softer either, it could also be less dense, or who knows. There a millions of ways to go about it.

But heck for practice, you can take a chapter from a great book and try to write to that emotion.

Program music.

Yes exactly! And muting the audio and replacing it with subtitles doesn't work for that.

... Yes it works perfectly fine, since you have the reference to work with. You know how the dialogue sounds, how loud it is, etc. You just work with that even if you have to take it out after. Jeesh, it's not hard honestly!