Music is the mesmerizing spirit that sets the emotional mood of a scene. When coupled with the elements of good camera work and the performance of good actors working from a good script, it completes the synthesis of effective movie story telling. Without music movies are boring. Without good camera work and acting, and in the absence of a good story, music has no effective context. It takes the proper combination of all these elements to create the magic of a motion picture. Yet music can make or break a movie. It must be just right for the scene. At Johnson Imagineering we specialize in editing video to sound. We use multi-track non-linear editing techniques to effectively build and layer the music and sound tracks to the visual action: The picture to the right is a screen grab from within the Sony Vegas Pro 8 editing system we use to create our productions. This is the actual track construction for the opening scenes of the short feature movie Cat! which we filmed in Germany in 2006 and completed in 2008.

We obtain many of our music tracks from SmartSound.com and use the Sonicfire Pro 5 library system to locate just the right music pieces for the desired edited music score. Using this system we can preview them online and select from hundreds of available pieces. Once we identify the track(s) needed, we then purchase the license and download it into our system. Then we custom edit it to fit the length and style of the scenes. The beauty of Sonicfire Pro system is that it allows us to purchase ONLY the specific track needed and the music licensing and synchronization rights are obtained at the point of purchase.