The British Film: Music Suites 18Mar2013

One of the coolest special features on some of our upcoming range of British films are suites compiled from clean musical soundtracks.

Historically, film soundtracks were prepared in three discrete sections with the dialogue, the sound effects and the music each recorded on separate audio streams. This enabled audio engineers to create the best possible sound mix but it also ensured that films could be easily sold to non-English speaking countries who could then substitute the English language track with one of their own making (while still being able to use the previously-prepared music and effects).

What you hear when you watch a film is an amalagamation of the dialogue, sound effects and music into one single, final mix, with the separate tracks usually ending up in the bin once the film had been released as they would have been perceived to be of no further use.

Luckily Studiocanal has retained the separate music tracks for several of our upcoming releases and we’re presenting these as continuous music suites: Man at the Top features 22 minutes of Roy Budd’s outstanding score whilst The House in Nightmare Park includes half an hour’s worth of Harry Robinson’s whimsically unsettling music. ’70s cheese-fest Spanish Fly features nearly an hour of Ron Goodwin’s tunes and we will be including similar suites in future releases where the materials are available.

Here’s a six minute sample of Roy Budd’s sublime score for Man at the Top so you can hear what you’ve got to look forward to: