When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of using real instruments and organic music in the filmmaking process to create a genuine connection between the music and the film's content.
In this quote, Ken Burns highlights the significance of authenticity in music production for films. He believes that recording music with real instruments rather than relying solely on digital editing brings an organic quality that enhances the storytelling. This approach allows the music to evolve in harmony with the film during the editing process, ultimately enriching the viewer's experience and making the content feel more genuine and emotionally resonant.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the creative process in filmmaking.
More from Ken Burns
All quotes →Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.
It is the great arrogance of the present to forget the intelligence of the past
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Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.
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Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut.
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.