Susan is right that you need permission from both the musician who wrote the music, as well as from the person who performed it (if that person is different from who wrote it). As far as the quotations go, I’m not sure how that would work, and my guess is the answer would be different if it were a contemporary person or a historical one. You might want to run it by an attorney if you’re going to publish your feature.

Hope that helps.

Paula

Thanks,
Karen

Ed Carreon

One can’t improve on the perfect Production – Life.
The all time leading Producer created the best featured documentary with endless multi-media versions.

It’s hard to debate its memorable qualities.
Words . . . all of life begin with them.

“So let it be written . . . so let it be done.”

Focused,

Ronald

Thanks for your post and sharing your thoughts. Just by way of background, I am producing short, audio slide shows (or series of them in chapter form) for clients, not feature films or documentaries. Distribution is intended for the internet on computer screens. My typical “profile” piece is 2-3 minutes.

A few things I have learned after spending the last couple of years of my working time producing multimedia:

1. A viewer will tolerate mediocre visuals, but not bad sound. If the sound is bad, or even mediocre, they will turn it off. That doesn’t mean we should aspire to mediocre visuals, it just means that the audio is more important than many of us who come from a visual background realize.

2. Some methods and work flows are more efficient than others. In creating narrative pieces which are driven by a script, I have found the most efficient method is to first edit the base audio interview to get the story line down, and then go out and get pictures to illustrate it. Ambient sound (which I love, by the way — also known as nat sound or wild sound) is added at the end to create richness.

My personal experience is on those occasions when I have had to shoot before editing the audio or before even doing an interview, I have invariably wasted much time, energy and resources creating images I don’t use, simply because I don’t know what the story is going to be yet. In these days of tight budgets, the more efficiently I can work, the better, and the happier the client is.

FWIW my workflow looks like this:
- Meet with client to discuss content
- Record audio interview with subject
- Edit interview and send to client for review.
- Do additional iterations or changes if necessary
- Get client approval
- Shoot photos to illustrate narrative and gather ambient sound to accompany it.
- Assemble feature in Final Cut.
- Send to client for approval.
- Make changes or additional iterations until client signs off.

There have been times when I have started with the visuals, but those tend to be more conceptual pieces that I do on my own rather than narrative features that I am hired to do. Both routes are valid, they are just accomplishing different goals. And yes, as you say, you do need to let the story guide your decisions.

Best,

Paula Lerner

Before I sit down to do an audio interview with the subject, I have a meeting with the client to discuss the content. At that time I try to gather as much pertinent information as I can about the person I’m going to interview, and thoroughly discuss with the client the message they want to convey with the piece, and the points they want this particular subject to highlight. I then work up a question list that will hopefully evoke appropriate responses from the subject.

The above applies to commercial or institutional clients, rather than to journalism clients. Both involve storytelling in a journalistic “style”, but the former involves telling the client’s story and starting with the client’s message, and finding ways to support that. For a journalism client, on the other hand, you start with the subject’s story and point of view, and let the story develop forward. Both require good preparation, research and good interview techniques. But I will leave those topics for another post on another day.

Best,

Paula Lerner

In documentary film work, which is much like “multimedia” production, we often use voiceovers and interview segments to augment or “space” the visual story being told by the visual imagery. But it is often NOT the audio that drives the story. In a visual medium, *visuals* are most often the driving force.

Images and sound both support each other, and it’s true that lousy sound can cause more damage to a story than lousy images. Bad sound calls attention to itself. Good sound can help make up for bad photography, while good photography can do very little to make up for bad sound. An audience will be annoyed by bad sound, no matter how great the images are.

But good sound can be just as easily created after the photography, as before it. You can shoot a visual story, and then supplement it with interview material, voice over narration, and most importantly, wild sound (ambient backgrounds) and FX, to create a complete and blended audio track for your visual story.

No one method is better than another, and we each will have our own preferences in our work flows. But keep in mind that most documentary and feature films (original “multimedia”) involve recording images and sound at the same time, editing these together, and THEN supplementing and pacing the material with additional sound, voice overs, etc. later on.

If you do enough multimedia or film production, you’ll eventually discover that your best laid initial plans for pacing and story flow must change dramatically in order to balance the respective strengths of both audio and visual content you actually wind up with.

That’s where you have to be willing to let the story guide your decisions.

Enjoy each journey, and thanks for your post.

Scott Highton