Movie trailer assignment or project

In a post early last year (link)  [Link checked on 3-08-2024.]  we drew attention to Frank Lehman's discussion of recent Star Wars trailers (link to his post on Musicology Now)  [Link updated on 3-08-2024.]. I can't say that I am overly fond of comments threads in general, but the conversation in Frank's post is interesting and informative. James Deaville's subsequent post about trailers to Musicology Now is definitely also worth a look: link.  [Link updated on 3-08-2024.]

Between them, these materials could provide suitable background for a class assignment or a student paper project on film trailers. The trailer might make an interesting twist on the screening report (Chapter 6), for example, or on the compare-contrast paper assignment (Chapter 10).

Since trailers are now readily available for a wide range of films, both historical and contemporary, they could be incorporated almost anywhere in the chronological sequence from the classical period onward. Caution: in the transition period, what you will find labeled "trailer" online (even on the most respectable sites like Turner Classic Movies) is often just a clip of one of the film's song performances.

More to the Film Score Guide series; course papers

At the bottom of this post is yesterday's list of the 19 volumes in the Film Score Guide monograph series, arranged in reverse chronological order of the film's general release. A checkmark (√) at the beginning of an entry indicates that the film is discussed or mentioned in Hearing the Movies, second edition.

If a course based on the book includes a final paper developed incrementally across the semester, it will follow logically through the work suggested in Chapters 6, 8, 10, 12, and 15. Recall that Chapters 6 and 8 explore the writing of scene analyses and the short papers we called “screening reports." The final sections of Chapters 10 and 12 focus, respectively, on a compare and contrast exercise and the building of a historical argument. In Chapter 15, the several earlier elements contribute to grounding a critical essay whose objective is to draw the sound track and music into a thematic reading, especially a reading that shows how these elements support or resist the dominant directions or emphases of the narrative. [The preceding text, btw, is a compressed and edited version of the opening paragraph of Chapter 15, page 509.]

One possibility— workable only with a small class, to be sure —would be to assign each student one of the films covered in the Film Score Guide series. Thus, reliable background and other basic information about the music and underscore composer would be readily available, and for the final paper (the work of Chapter 15) the student might well find material that would lead to supporting or challenging the arguments or point of view of the volume's author.

• 2008
• √18. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's The Dark Knight. May 2, 2016. Vasco Hexel
• 2007
• 15. Ilan Eshkeri's Stardust. IAN SAPIRO. July 2013
• 2000
• 17. James Newton Howard's Signs. January 14, 2016. Erik Heine
• 1997
• √9. Mychael Danna's The Ice Storm. MIGUEL MERA. June 2007
• 1996
• 7. Gabriel Yared's The English Patient. HEATHER LAING. February 2007
• 1993-94
• √12. Zbigniew Preisner's Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red. NICHOLAS W. REYLAND. December 2011
• 1989
• √4. Danny Elfman's Batman. JANET K. HALFYARD. September 2004
• 1974
• 16. David Shire's The Conversation. October 8, 2015. Juan Chattah
• 1972 ff.
• √11. Nino Rota's The Godfather Trilogy. FRANCO SCIANNAMEO. October 2010
• 1966
• √3. Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. CHARLES LEINBERGER. September 2004
• 1960
• √19. Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven. May 31, 2017. Mariana Whitmer
• 1959
• √12. Miklós Rózsa's Ben-Hur. ROGER HICKMAN. March 2011
• 1958
• √13. Jerome Moross's The Big Country. MARIANA WHITMER. June 2012
• 2. Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook. Feb 28, 2001. David Cooper
• 1956
• 5. Louis and Bebe Barron's Forbidden Planet. JAMES WIERZBICKI. June 2005
• 1954
• 14. Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront. ANTHONY BUSHARD. December 2012
• 1951
• √10. Alex North's A Streetcar Named Desire. ANNETTE DAVISON. February 2009
• 1947
• 6. Bernard Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. DAVID COOPER. August 2005
• 1942
• √1. Max Steiner's Now, Voyager: A Film Score Guide. Jul 30, 2000. Kate Daubney
• 1940
• √11. Franz Waxman's Rebecca. DAVID NEUMEYER AND NATHAN PLATTE. December 2011
• 1938
• √8. Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The Adventures of Robin Hood. BEN WINTERS. March 2007

Scene Analysis Assignment

For the assignment, I require the students to select at least two scenes and the scenes must total at least six minutes of film.

They begin by making a complete shot list and sound track description for the scene. For each shot, I ask them to provide:

• A time code for each shot.


• A shot description, which should include the characters in (or object of) the shot, the framing (LS, MS, CU, etc.), any significant camera movements, and any image transition other than a cut (dissolve, wipe, etc.). A brief description of the action can also sometimes be useful.


• A complete transcription of the dialogue in the shot.


• A listing and description of the sound effects. (In an action sequence from recent films, it is unlikely that the list will be completely exhaustive, but try to be as complete as possible.)
• A listing and description of the music.


• General remarks, which contain more detailed comments about aspects of the sound track, including interactions among the components and how they interact with the images/narrative.

Filling out the form requires making at least four passes through the scene, attending on each pass to one element:

1. Time code and shot description
2. Dialogue
3. Sound effects
4. Music

.
Here is what the scene analysis blank looks like:

I distribute the blanks as an Excel file. I also give them some exemplars, which are provided as jpgs below. After the students have filled out their forms for the scenes, I will ask them to write a short paper based on these analyses.

The first examplar is the terrace scene from Rebecca.


(We analyze this scene using musical notation in HtM, pp. 218-21.)

* * * * *

The second is the main title and Trinity in a jam, from The Matrix:




We analyze this sequence from The Matrix on pp. 223-24 of HtM, albeit in much less detail. Note the large number of shots (and short average shot length) in this sequence. Also this is a very busy sound track, and at times it is difficult to know whether a particular event belongs to the sound effects track or the music track. A version of the script is located here. (Correction: HtM refers to the agents collectively as Mr. Smiths; according to both IMDB and the script, however, the other two agents in this scene are named Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones.)

* * * * *

The third example consists of two scenes from 42nd Street.



Neither of these dialogue scenes has music. The number of sound effects is also quite low.

Week 8 Lectures

This week's lectures focused on scene analysis. The text has three chapters given over to scene analysis: Chapters 6, 7 and 9 [1st edition; in the 2d edition this material is spread over three of the historical chapters: 6, 7, and 10]. Besides giving the students an overview of the scene types, I also wanted this week's lectures to help prepare students for making scene analyses of their own, as this is the task for their second paper.

I began by following the divisions of the chapters and then formalizing some implicit subdivisions of scene types:



(NB: "Supradiegetic" is a term Rick Altman uses in The American Film Musical to describe the characteristic performance situation in a film musical, where the singing is diegetic but the accompaniment is rendered, usually after an audio dissolve from diegetic piano, by a nondiegetic orchestra. The performance is thus partially diegetic and partially nondiegetic and for Altman is representative of the idealized realm of romance.)

I then sorted the scenes according to how they deployed the sound track.



We then looked at a number of examples.

For main titles: Meet Me in St. Louis, Broadway Melody, 42nd Street, and The Apartment. I actually ran each of these examples well into the first scene so we could talk about how the main title dovetails with the establishing sequence and how the establishing sequence serves to set up the first scene. Music runs right through the establishment sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis and covers all of the opening dialogue scene in the kitchen until Agnes begins to sing, when it shifts to accompanying the song. After opening with a brief bit of the title song, Broadway Melody continues "Give My Regards to Broadway" over an establishing shot of the city; the music ends for an exterior shot of the music store, where we hear snatches of music coming from the store; with the cut into the store, we hear a cacophony of diegetic musical sound. The scene will eventually end with a performance of "Broadway Melody." 42nd Street, like Meet Me in St. Louis follows the classic two-theme title music, the title song opening the credits, with a shift to "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" when the credits turn to the actors. The music returns to the title song for the beginning of the establishing sequence, creating a three-part ternary structure (ABA') for the titles and establishing sequence considered together. As is often the case, the first extended dialogue scene, here between Abner and Dorothy, does not have music. Finally, the titles for The Apartment use a single theme. The establishment sequence, which integrated into a prologue with voiceover commentary, has new music, a march that contrasts with the lush romantic quality of the main title theme proper. The music continues until it is displaced by diegetic music coming out of Bud's apartment, just before the voiceover itself ends, marking the conclusion of the prologue.

We next compared the opening of the 1933 version of King Kong with that of the 2005 version, noting that the recent version is much, much shorter. We then also compared the final scene and end credits of these two films, so we could see how long end credits are today and how short they were in the studio era. (In fact, due to time, we did not watch all of the end credits of the 2005 version, but we watched enough of it to get the point.)

We then watched the Ländler scene from Sound of Music as an example of a performance scene before turning to two examples of montage: the montage sequence of Blood as pirate from Captain Blood and "I Wasn't Born to Follow" from Easy Rider. I then presented two action scenes: the opening of Captain Blood and the theft of the sword, from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Finally, we watched some dialogue scenes: the terrace scene from Rebecca and the opening scene between Abner and Dorothy from 42nd Street.

Week 6 Lectures

This week we covered Chapter 5, Music in Film Form.*  Because it deals with relatively large spans of time, the content for this chapter is a bit more challenging to present during lecture—especially if your class is organized, as is mine, without a required screening of full films. I compromised a bit and watched the first 50 minutes or so of Casablanca, so we could discuss some of these issues of large-scale organization of film and music.

[*update: 2-23-18: The basic material of the first edition Chapter 5 that is covered here is in Chapter 6, pp. 187 ff. Because of the chronological sequence adopted for the second edition, the film examples are from around 1930. In the second edition, the establishing sequence for Meet Me in St. Louis is discussed in Chapter 7, pp. 254-55.]

I began this week's lectures talking about the differences in runtime segmentation between music and film. I followed the text in presenting the hierarchical divisions of music (motive, phrase, period, section, movement) and film (shot, scene, sequence, act). For music we then looked at the chorus of "Meet Me in St, Louis, Louis" in terms of 32-bar song form. (The sheet music itself is available here.)



For a variety of reasons, terminology for 32-bar song form is not always consistent, with the repeated A sections sometimes called "verses" on the one hand, the B section called a "bridge" or "middle eight" on the other. Since "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis," like most Tin Pan Alley-era songs, also includes a proper verse, calling the A sections "verses" easily leads to confusion. I therefore chose to label the opening two phrases as "phrase one (A)" and "phrase two (A')"; I labeled the final phrase as "recapitulation (A")"; and retained the term "bridge (B)" for the contrasting middle section. At subphrase level, I marked out "basic idea" units of two measures rather than motives proper; the varied rhythmic repetition of the second "Louis" (which in performance is sometimes transferred to the initial "Louis" as well) creates a distinct motive that recurs in every phrase of the chorus, including the bridge.

As I noted above, "Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis" has a proper verse that precedes the chorus, which makes the chorus a section of the full song.

In terms of film form, we looked at an early segment of the film, Meet Me in St. Louis, where the song is introduced by Agnes and then passed along to Grandpa and the older teens. Here is a shot list:

From Title Song Scene—Shot List

1. LS, Agnes and others in kitchen, tracks into hallway
   
   
   
   


2. LS, Climbing stairs
   
   
   
   
   


3. MLS, Grandpa in bathroom
   
   
   
   
   


4. LS, Agnes and Grandpa, tracks following Grandpa
   
   
   
   


5. MLS, Grandpa in bedroom, at end to window
   
   
   
   


6. ELS, Street from Grandpa’s window
   
   
   
   
   


7. LS, street level
   
   
   
   

We then lined up the shots with the musical articulations:

From Title Song Scene—Shot List and Music

1. Agnes sings (AA’ beginning of bridge)
2. Middle of bridge
3. Grandpa takes over (AA’)
4. Bridge and A”
5. AA and bridge (offscreen teens)
6. Recap (A”)
7. Stretched out cadence.

One of the parallels between music and film form we can see here is that the beginning of each chorus initiates a new space (Agnes into the hallway; Grandpa in the bathroom; Grandpa in his bedroom). In each case the shift to the bridge also brings pronounced movement: Agnes climbs the stairs; Grandpa in the hallway; the teens coming to the house in the carriage. Here we can say that the film form seems to be responding to the particularities of musical phrasing; this is fairly typical in musical sequences, especially in musicals. (A brief discussion of this segment can be found in HtM, pp. 167-68.)

* * *

The remainder of the lecture for the week was taken up with screening and discussion of roughly the first half of Casablanca. Here the emphasis was on issues of larger level audiovisual phrasing and the identification of structural sync points. In terms of the audiovisual phrasing I drew attention to the nondiegetic music (and voiceover) for the opening prologue; the exclusive use of diegetic music for the early scenes at Rick's; the diegetic musical reaction to Ilsa's initial appearance and the nondiegetic stinger when Rick first sees Ilsa (the crucial sync point in the first half of the film); the audio dissolves that bookend the flashback; and the emotional fluctuations in the music as it responds to the dialogue in the scene with Ilsa that follows the flashback. If I had time, I would have carefully compared the scene where Rick and Ilsa meet (discussed in the text on pp. 102-06) with the scene between Rick and Ilsa after the flashback in terms of audiovisual phrasing and the location of sync points; I haven't completed laying out my lectures for this week, so if I can find 20-30 minutes, I may well spend the beginning of Tuesday's lecture exploring this issue.

* * *

Finally, we ended the week with the second quiz. I tried something new. Besides having the students define and discuss terms, I gave them short transitions to identify using the terminology from Chapter 4. I chose four segments from (500) Days of Summer, each lasting roughly 30 seconds, and played them three times each. Although the students were quite apprehensive about the task—with copyright issues it is difficult to give students much practice since it takes class time—they actually performed quite well. I also had them write a short essay on the party scene from the same film. Here is the question:

This scene comes from near the end of (500) Days of Summer. After having broken up with Summer, Tom meets her at a wedding of a mutual acquaintance. They seem to hit it off again, and she invites him to a party. This is the party scene, which is accompanied throughout by Regina Spektor’s “Hero.” The lyrics to the song are attached.

Note that the music is similar in form to “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” which we discussed in class; the large musical sections are marked in the margins. It is basically an AA’BA” song with the second BA” repeated in varied form. The first A” also repeats the lyrics of A’ whereas the final A” introduces new lyrics. The individual sections are longer than the standard 8 measures—this is common in popular music today—and each is divided into subsections (indicated by stanza breaks in the lyrics).

Write a paragraph describing the sound track of this clip paying particular attention to sync points and issues of audio visual phrasing. How is film form affected by the music in this scene? What lyrics stand out and how do these relate to the image and unfolding narrative situation? What role do the musical articulations (the beginning of sections) seem to play organizing the scene? Mention anything else you see as particularly significant or interesting in the sequence. Aim to be as complete as you can in describing the sounds and music.

Obviously, I provided a lyric sheet with musical sections indicated. I also played the sequence, which lasts a little over 3 minutes, three times. I found the students did pretty well on this question as well—although more than I would have liked had difficulty with the concept of the sync point. Nevertheless, most noticed that the beginning of the final (ironic) A section coincides with the close-up of Summer's engagement ring.