Tuesday, November 9, 2010

M-M-M-Montage

Oh man, do I ever love a good montage. Hell, not even a good montage; any montage will do. The combination of music and clips is so manipulative and I am more than willing to be manipulated. There must be some sort of montage 101 template that every montage-maker must follow (after the jump):


Music (pick one):

  • a 70's emotional-blackmaily song, think Turn, Turn, Turn
  • a softer, ballady Waits, think Jersey Girl; Good Vibrations
  • Baba O'Riley
  • something by a lady singer-song writer, Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman or Tori Amos 
  • a Monkeys-esque pop song
  • a 90's hip-hop song, maybe Hip Hop by Dead Prez
  • Total Eclipse of the Heart
  • Coldplay
  • Johnny Cash covering something from the '90's
  • something Hawaiian involving a ukulele
  • a song from Carmen or any other well-known opera


Clips (pick ten or more):

  • Women shopping
  • couples fighting then crying
  • lots of wistful, faraway looks
  • someone, forehead to glass, staring, sadly out of a moving car in the fall
  • people laughing around a big table, eating dinner, drinking red wine 
  • a very quick succession of clips all depicting the same thing (weddings, rednecks getting hurt, slaps, girls screaming)
  • a middle-age woman who sinks to the floor after answering the phone)
  • an audience rising to a standing ovation
  • a person comforting another person, in tears, while sitting on the last three steps
  • birds-eye view of a funeral
  • a single tear slipping down a man's cheek
  • someone swiping everything off a desk
  • commencement/valedictorian speech followed immediately by the grads throwing their caps in the air; a tear falling on a letter/telegram
  • really hot twenty-five year olds strutting down a high school hallway
  • a messenger riding his bike down a tree-lined street
  • airport arrival scene
  • the smashing of a wine-filled glass on terra-cotta
  • a burlesque dancer shimmying
  • a child on Christmas morning
  • someone running through the woods in the rain, illuminated by lightning
  • teenagers kissing in a pool
  • a family in a waiting room, not speaking
  • painful-looking high school talent show
  • a person standing with their back to the camera, watching a plane take off through a large window
  • a group of teenagers running down a busy New York sidewalk, knocking into an older businessman
  • a man slipping to his knees in a back yard in the rain, hands at his face.


This here is my most favourite montage video. Swearingen! Nate! Carmella! Larry David? Every time I watch it I go a little warm and gooey in my frontal lobe.

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