You can get all the slow motion shots, beautiful sunsets and aerial shots that you want, but it doesn’t mean s*** without the right music. That’s a bit of a bold statement but let us explain. Of course, having beautifully shot images will enhance the visual experience and the way you edit the shots together will create the pace and style and narrative of the video but the music is what really gels all of those three things together and gives the entire film a ‘feeling’.

The 3 pillars of finding the right emotion using your soundtrack.

Without music there is no (or very little) emotion (mute a video/film and see for yourself). In order to understand what kind of music would work best with your edit you can look at the following 3 elements.

Pacing:

The pacing of a film comes down to the way it has been edited (transitions and cuts between the shots). If your scene is cutting from one shot to the next quite quickly, you can assume that the music is going to need to have a higher BPM, as it will also need to be pretty quick to match the pace of the cuts or changes in the shots. This usually work well with the party scenes in wedding films, where there’s a lot of movement in the scenes and you can cut between guests and the bride and groom dancing to shots of the DJ, people drinking and a bunch of other wedding stuff that happens when people have had a few drink in them/decide to party!

Alternatively, if you have shots that are longer in length or have slow dissolve transitions, you’ll be wanting something with a lower BPM to reflect the slower pace.

Colour Pallette/Style:

The colours that you have in your scene will help you find the most befitting style of music that works well for your film. Generally, warmer colours will naturally fit better with more uplifting music (although can work well with something a bit more melancholic/nostalgic sounding). However, darker colours will natural fit better with deeper and grittier sounding music. Dark colours in a wedding video, you ask? Well, don’t sound too surprised - there’s a plethora of beautifully unique wedding films that are trying all sorts of artistically different styles. Here’s a great example by Super Weddings:

Narrative:

Narrative is important in all forms of storytelling - and that’s exactly what you’re doing with a wedding film. Telling their story. The style in which you tell their story is an artistic choice and in the same fashion, what you as the editor chooses to focus on in your version of narrating their story is your artistic choice. Just as the way you piece your shots together will visually narrate the story, a soundtrack unfolds a narrative too. Music moves up and down in momentum, depth and power and in doing so, it takes a listener on an emotional journey. You’ll always want to make sure that both the visual narrative and musical narrative matches to have the most impact.

There are multiple ways of approaching your edit; cut to music vs score music to image.

Both workflows are valid ways of working but up until recently, you’d need to have a big budget to have someone score music to your film. However, with Filmstro you can now not only access the world’s first and biggest dynamic music library, but using the momentum, depth and power slider you can now craft your soundtrack to fit your wedding film perfectly. Check out our short overview below: