Lol Hammond Guest Lecture 5/10/15
As part of our Semester A audio project we had Lol Hammond in to discuss the role of a music supervisor and his experiences within this role. In his earlier life Hammond was a music producer releasing some iconic records with the likes of Drum Club, Roger Eno, Chris coco and more. Through this he managed to get the position of a music supervisor in a company called Vertigo films working on brilliant films such as Monsters and Bronson. He got into the film industry by working as an advisor to start then got offered a job in a company.
For his talk Hammond spoke about the intertwining relationship’s between a music supervisor and various other important roles in the filmmaking industry. The most important relationship I took from his talk was between the Director and the music supervisor. He explained how the music supervisor has to try to convey and convert the directors idea’s into the best possible end product; sometimes it seems this may be quite challenging. This can also be challenging because of film budgets. Hammond explained how an average price for a song inside a film (not in the credits) was normally between £1500-£2000 aside, split between the publisher and the record company. However famous songs can reach extortionate amounts which make them impossible to have in lower budget films. He also spoke about the interaction with composers, one of his main jobs is to liaise with the composer and pass on the directors input professionally and with caution.
From what Lol Hammond has described, a huge role of a music supervisor is liaising with other people to make sure the music is to a high standard for the project. This could be anything from choosing the music to try to get the rights to use a piece of music. He described how it is often good to give the director a few different options to choose from, that way it wastes less time if the director does not like a choice of the music supervisor.
This lecture was extremely useful to me as I will be taking on the title of Music Supervisor for our film for audio project 1. Although I will be involved in a lot of the post and location sound, music is the part I intend to spend the most time on. It was useful to hear someone’s experience in the industry as this job role is one I may look to in the future.