“Fill out your bio’s and at the end of this you guys can’t leave this room until each of you has been matched.” Sounds like a speed dating event or something right? Wrong… A vi-tal part of our documentary process is the music that is going to back our stories. Music can create the mood of a film, shape the audiences attention and feelings, establish the time and space of a story, reveal character, create tension or a plot twist… So many crucial and important things come from the music of a film; that it makes perfect sense when going to pick a composer for our documentaries it was treated like a match.com date night. Two weeks before this event, the film group and students from the Musicube Academy met to hear each of us film student’s documentary pitches. Musicube is a film score composition production academy, based here in Bonn and actually at the AIB too. This first meeting was a piece of cake for us. We have been pitching these documentaries since our first weekend in Eifel. It was our second meeting, the pairing, that really got us nervous. On this day each composer from Musicube played three minutes of his or her work along with visual images they thought their music would match well to. Adven-turous music to mountain ranges, epic music to churches, and even hip hop beats to city skylines were shown.
Going into the pitch, many of us were nervous and thinking “how is someone going to make music that’s going to match my topic of Burlesque dancing… or Swordsmithing… or Animal Shelters… or even a Vegetable Orchestra?” But much to our surprise the composers showed an incredible range of music that could be paired to each of our unique stories. After the composers showed their talents, the awkward part came. Feelings from our first high school dance started lurking beneath us. “Do I go talk to that guy? I really liked his songs. I think he wants to work with someone else though… I should just go over there. Shouldn’t I? No… I don’t know…” All of these thoughts came rushing when our directors announced it was time to find a match. But eventually the nerves subdued and connections were made. The communication between the composers and us was really enlightening; as for the first time someone really understood the message we’re trying to portray and even knows how to do so through music. At the end of the meeting each of us walked away with something. We gained experience in net-working and a very important newly created partnership that will be shown in our final documentaries.
Written by Jocelyn Cooper
