Adding music to a montage

For me, it's definitely music first. This is a musical montage, after all. I choose the music I want to fit the desired mood (but I only do so, if I think I have the footage to also fit that specific music and mood).

I'll lay down the footage, without music, in a very rough, rudimentary edit. At this point, I'm only concerned with the order of the clips, which ones seem to make sense in which order. After this very rough ordering of clips, I lay down the music, and then the real editing begins. Clips get shortened, lengthened, sped-up, slowed-down, moved to a separate location. Depending on the project, editing a musical montage can be either incredibly simple, or incredibly complex. Either way, I'd say it's music first.

I totally agree with Cracker Funk's method - place your images/ideas in order first. This will allow you to flesh out your montage more than just in your head and may eventually influence your choice of music enough to change your mind. Then get your music and edit everything to fit your music.

If you are planning to have music made for your project then a "needle drop" is a good place to start.

The idea is that you edit your project to a song, or bits of favorite songs that you think fit.

Of course you don't have any right to use these tracks in your project, but rather you use them as a "template' to the composer! This give the composer are much better sense of what YOU want to emphasize etc..

When the composer is done, you replace your "needle drop" tracks with the new composition.. and render\release.. etc

You can do it both ways. Have someone compose for your montage and then tweak it a bit or make your montage fit a particular piece of music.

The approach I took when filming mine was develop the story first, storyboard it, decide what I wanted to show, how I was going to pace it, what and where the turning points would be etc.

It was later that I began looking for music which had those elements in it, in terms of pacing, having a beginning, middle and end of appropriate length and so on. Slight tweaks were made in editing and I had something that seemed it was meant to fit together.

If you're a beginner, MUSIC first.

Pacing is key and tends to be crappy on amateur productions. Having a good music to which you fit the footage will help get the pacing right. Once you've done that a few times, you'll have learned a thing or two about pacing that will allow you to do good work without the need of a music.