Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds to Mary Poppins

The book I'm writing will document that The Beatles wrote a lot of their music to sync to film scenes. At first, that's a hard concept to grasp. The natural question would be, why would they? The natural answer is that, if you were writing lyrics would you find it helpful to work with visuals or not work with visuals? There is a lot more to it than that but hopefully that's a point to start from.

Another key point to realize is that artists rarely use just one film scene as inspiration. Often it's several scenes within the same film as well as scenes in other films. Artists are magnets for ideas, obtaining them wherever they can. The beauty of films is there are repetitive ideas or themes that help them work on their songs.

When showing someone a sync, I'll get the response, 'some things work really well and some things were a complete miss. ' Often the reason is that the artists might have gotten inspiration for the beginning from one film and a different film for the ending.

To help illustrate that point, let's look at the song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. The first video shows a composite scene of three separate scenes in the film, Mary Poppins to the song. I've also included two of the three full syncs as well.

The song starts with the lyrics:

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies

Is inspired by Bert's (Dick Van Dyke) chalk drawings in the park. Just moments before the start of the sync we see his drawing 'Punting On The Thames.'

At the start of the sync to help with the visuals in his drawing, Bert pretends to be in a boat, using his chalk stick to move his boat through the water. Thus 'picture yourself' works for Bert's pictures as well as their 'Jolly Holiday' within the chalk drawing of a English countryside.

Enjoy!