By:
Simon Marett
Date::
30 Sep 2011
I always love travelling to Scandinavia and I visit Norway on a regular basis (my wife is Norwegian) so when the opportunity came up to attend Nordisk Panorama, a major annual Nordic documentary festival in Aarhus, Denmark, I jumped at the chance. This was a great opportunity to learn more about the use of music in documentaries from the Nordic region and practice my NorwegIan language skills - much needed!
The Nordic region is a vital territory for Audio Network and I wanted to gain a good understanding of the documentary music needs and requirements from the 1000 or so producers, directors, distributors and filmmakers that attend the event.
What music do documentary filmmakers prefer to use?
What struck me immediately in our meetings was that music in documentaries is a vital component of the creative process and it is taken very seriously by both the director and the producer. This is also reflected in the production budgets for documentaries where music will often have a figure of 20-30k set aside.
The Director - who has the overall creative vision for the film - will generally almost always want to use a composer that he or she has worked with before. This doesn't only apply to music in the documentary but many other aspects of the production too including script writing, editing and post.
The benefits of rights cleared music
Familiarity with a composer you’ve worked with before is not the only benefit of going down the Specially Composed route. It also helps with rights clearance because the producer can feel safe in the knowledge that by signing a deal with a single composer there will be no hidden costs cropping up in the future when the distributor sells the doc into a new territory or platform. This is crucial because international sales distribution is vital for any documentary filmmaker looking for a return from their film.
A few of the filmmakers I met had used music libraries in the past but generally they had had poor experiences. These experiences fell into 3 categories: inflexible pricing, variable quality in the music and poor customer service. This was encouraging because even though Audio Network is relatively unknown in the region, our model and music addresses many of these issues.
Our favourite Docs at Nordisk Panorama
No documentary festival visit would be complete without seeing at least a couple of Docs and I managed to see a number of excellent films at Nordisk Panorama, including my pick of the bunch ‘Love Always, Carolyn’ directed by Maria Ramstrom & Malin Korkeasolo and produced by WG Film AB in Sweden. For a full list of the Film Award Winners visit the Nordisk Panorama website.
Next year, the Festival moves to Oulu in Finland and I’m already looking forward to it. That gives me 12 months to brush up on my Finnish!
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