Cutting Music for Reality and Unscripted Television
On Friday 12th July, we had a terrific seminar on editing music for productions run by Toby Trappel. Toby led us through his work as a senior Editor on a variety of reality television shows, and using clips from "MasterChef" and "LEGO Masters", Toby broke down his process for finding the right music track for a scene, and then re-editing it to enhance the drama of a scene.
Toby relies on four main concepts when he’s looking at music for a scene: What’s the motivation of the music? How does the music add or connect to what’s there?What am I applying it to? What ideas keep on working, what keeps being useful? And also to know when to ignore these rules. For Toby, music needs to add and connect to the story, so you need to have your story working in the edit before you add your music. You need to be clear about your story, structure and characters before you add your music.
Toby explored the way you need to create a connection between your edit and your music by looking for music that enhances the scene, and then finding coinciding beats and moments between the drama of the scene, the rhythm of your cuts and the beats of the music that you’re working with. Toby discussed how he breaks down a music track, looking for the timing points so that you can re-edit the track to suit the drama of your scene. He also looked at the advantage of having stems for your tracks (a luxury you don’t often get with production music), and how you can use these stems to re-edit your music track. But even without stems, Toby explored ways of editing tracks to suit the drama of your scene.
Sadly, two hours wasn’t enough time for Toby to take us through all of his ideas on editing music at the depth that he wanted to explore these ideas, so we’re looking forward to the next session of Toby’s ideas on editing music.
Andrew Brinsmead
Executive Committee Member
(eNews 93 - August 2019)
Cutting Music For Reality and Unscripted Television
The ASE are excited to present a seminar on the practicalities of editing music
for Reality & Unscripted television.
As Unscripted TV programs have evolved in Australia, more refined and complex music editing
has often become part of the narrative Editor’s process.
Presented by Toby Trappel - Senior and Supervising Editor "LEGO Masters", "Survivor",
and "MasterChef" - this seminar will explore Toby’s core ideas and methods
for effectively using pre-recorded music in your edits.
We are looking forward to a night which will demystify the complex process of choosing
and editing pre-existing music tracks, and the structuring and refining of your edits to work with them.
This will be of interest to Reality, Unscripted & Documentary Editors –
and anyone who has to cut music as part of their editing process!
Venue Details & Time:
Date: Friday 12th July
Time: 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Location:
AFTRS Main Theatre,
Building 130,
The Entertainment Quarter,
Moore Park NSW 2021, Australia
(Entry via Errol Flynn Boulevard)
Please rsvp to: office@screeneditors.com.au