A fellow journalist & teacher recently told me he was surprised that we used music with our stories in this class.
There’s no doubt that music has a tremendous power to change the way people feel about a story. I know I wouldn’t use music with a news story but for stories about the rest of our lives, why not? Music is such a big part of our lives and culture and history.
Here’s a great example of how music can change the way we perceive a story, as a humorous mashup, using the dramatic music from the movie Inception and grafting it on to some pretty famous dramatic movie climaxes. This particular version “When Harry Met Inception”, is only slightly NSFW but follow the Wired Magazine link for some other great examples, most NSFW.
Personally, I think everything thing we do as storytellers is manipulation and we just need to start with that statement as the baseline. But maybe that’s a conversation better continued outside the classroom.[For a better mind than mine, check out Ken Burns brilliant take on Jean Luc Godard’s famous “Cinema is truth 24 times a second”.]
Thoughts?
