Music Blog: Licensing Nightmare

  

     For the opening sequence, we needed a song to play in Sadie’s headphones when she walked into the house. We explored many options and considered many possible genres. We first considered using a more popular song. I sent an email to the artist for permission. We quickly realized that getting permission from a larger artist would be very difficult. Most popular artists either do not respond to independent filmmakers or require licensing fees that were beyond our budget for this project. We therefore settled with a song called The Lions, by a small band Nirmala has relations with that goes by the name of Mr. Entertainment and the Pookiesmackers. This way it would be much easier to secure permission. We were graciously granted to use any part of the song we would like for this project, for a period of 14 months. This was a relief, since I felt music licensing was one of the larger hurdles we needed to overcome with this project. We would only use the first 20 seconds of this song. 

    The song is of the rock genre, which we felt would match the way we portrayed Sadie in the opening sequence. We wanted Sadie to appear detached as she entered her house. To obtain an audio file of this song, I recorded the audio on my computer while playing the YouTube link to the song. I then aligned it with the shots, adjusting the length of the shots to match better with the music. I noticed, however, that the music does not sound like it is being played from headphones. It sounded too clean, more like a soundtrack than diegetic audio. I then decided to make a recording on my phone of the song playing on a speaker, so that it sounds like the sound is coming from Sadie’s headphones. This gave the audio a more realistic, muffled quality, which fit the scene much better. This entire process taught me how much work goes into seemingly simple audio moments in a film. 

Screenshot of email giving us 
permission to use The Lions