Tag: Film Life

Film Life

Best Movie Soundtracks

Olusala Sisters

A Lot Like Love

Love when a movie has pop music in it that fits and somehow doesn’t overpower the acting. It’s one of those creative decisions Hollywood gets to make but if an indie filmmaker did it they would be called amateur.

Noah’s Arc Jumping the Broom

I used to scavenge like a fiend for all the songs on YouTube because I was too cheap to buy it. An ex boyfriend bought it for me for my birthday and it is still to this day, one of the best birthday gifts I ever received. The boyfriend is gone, but the music is, as Cardi B says “forevvvvaaaaaa”.

Mamma Mia

Growing up with my mom’s love of ABBA, this was a delight to watch, listen to, and sing along with.

Lemonade Mouth

“Reach for my hand cuz it’s held out for you,

My shoulders are small but you can cry on them too.

Everything changes but one thing is true, understand,

We’ll always be more than a band”

For the rest of the song they sing “my shoulders are strong” instead of “my shoulders are small”.

“More Than a Band” I love this song. So sweet, innocent, and encouraging. The whole movie has great songs but this one is the best, according to me 🙂

Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan

To be fair…this is actually an audiobook I listened to, not a movie. Music is integral to the storytelling and I don’t know how one could just read this book, you must absolutely listen to it. It follows a harmonica that affects several different, and I mean DIFFERENT characters around the world. Fredrich is in Germany and his tendency to stand up and conduct the imaginary orchestra that he hears in his head catches the eyes of the Nazis. Mike and his brother are orphans trying to stay together in Pennsylvania. Ivy is a young Latina in California whose brother is off at war. Then there is Otto who meets 3 sisters forced to work for a witch in the forest. Amazing story…the music is beautiful.

Film Life

Lessons Learned: Working with a crew on a film set

Olusala Sisters

We had production assistants, a gaffer, a boom operator, production sound mixer, director of photography,  Assistant Camera, and 1st Assistant Director. It would have been great to have more help.  More production assistants,  assistant directors, assistant cameras,  grips, actor wranglers, script supervisor, and probably a whole slew of jobs we don’t even know about.  However, we hustled and made it work. Anyways, this was a big crew to us…. and our pocketbooks.

Sometimes things were moving too slow.

Sometimes it was chaotic.

But we made it through.

Production days are so stressful… so incredulously stressful.

2 lessons I’m taking on for future productions… build time into the schedule to check the quality of the work… all the work regardless of how tight the schedule. Sounds like a no brainer but with a million things going it is nice to feel you can trust certain people with certain tasks. I’m not there yet.  I don’t think I have the budgets necessary for that yet.  I have listened to audio before and lots of bad audio got past my ears so I decided to not waste my time listening as long as I had a professional to monitor it for me… bottom line like my sister says…. “trust.. but verify”

Second lesson.. trust my instincts… if I have to spend one iota of time thinking about whether or not someone is actually working it’s because they are not actually working. I had planned not to ask someone back because I hadn’t seen them working… after talking to other crew members they all pledged I was mistaken. Next day…. same stuff. Money leaving my pocket for somebody’s non-work… infuriating.