Throughout our film, the contrast between silence and music playing will be vital. Put simply, silence will represent the sadness in Tim’s life, while music will represent his one source of happiness. A majority of the film will be filled with near silence, clearly suggesting that a majority of his lifestyle is filled with a level of sadness. This will therefore make the few moments in which music does play all the more powerful and moving. The major moment where the presence of music will be highly important is the scene that takes place during the band’s show (I discuss other elements of this scene in more depth here).
A significant aspect of the music in this scene is that it will not actually be the music of the band – which would presumably be guitar heavy – but rather a kind of non-diegetic peaceful synthy song. This will hopefully juxtapose with the movements of the crowd in an interesting type of way, that really emphasises Tim’s subjectivity. Another reason for this is that the exact type of music that Tim is into is not exactly the central idea of his obsession, as it is more about a type of love and belonging. There is also an element of this concept that you could compare to Roman Polanski not showing the baby in Rosemary’s Baby, though I’m not totally sure I can articulate the reasons why.
As mentioned in our pitch, a scene out of the series, Baskets, was significant in its inspiration for this way of using music. in this scene a sort of ‘peaceful synth song’ is played against visuals of a street-rave party. Hopefully the very powerful and moving nature of this scene will somehow resemble our own scene.
In terms of the specific song, we are planning to use this track from Moby.
Using his service mobygratis, this will be a great fit to our vision (peaceful synthy song) of what is essentially the film’s climax.
References
Baskets. (2016). (video) USA: Louis CK, Zach Galifinakis.
Denny, N. (2003). The Spirit of Music in Art. In Modern Painters, 16(2), pp.68-71.
Rosemary’s Baby. (1968). [film] USA: Roman Polanski