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
In most films music is brought in at the end, after the picture is more or less locked, to amplify the emotions the filmmaker wants you to feel.
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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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
I'll tell you something, and this is true: I've never been able to write a film which I didn't respect. I just can't do it. I'm very happy about all the films I haven't done.
Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.
If you're sitting in your minivan, playing your computer animated films for your children in the back seat, is it the animation that's entertaining you as you drive and listen? No, it's the storytelling. That's why we put so much importance on story. No amount of great animation will save a bad story.
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.