Sound Ideas and Influences

Again looking back at our original individual research, we already had a good base when looking at the certain styles of music and sounds that would be relevant for our teaser trailer and genre. We had all picked up on certain sounds in different trailers and so already had a good understanding of the sounds that we would want for our production.

We decided that we wanted an orchestral style music so that it would be haunting, but not too church or funeral-like. We didn't totally dismiss the idea of lyrics, but we're mainly looking for an instrumental piece. The instruments we will be focusing on are string instruments, piano pieces, and maybe some percussion, which are the most common instruments in the types of music we will be looking at.

Once we have found an exact style, we may look at creating a piece of music ourselves using Garage Band on an Apple Mac, or else use a piece of uncopyrighted music by an unsigned artist.

A soundtrack of a film/trailer that particularly stood out in my memory as being orchestral and similar to what we would want was that of The DaVinci Code and Angels & Demons -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5FyRZbqfeM

This particular piece 'Chevaliers de Sangreal' is possibly too dramatic, and not haunting enough for our production, however it was composed by Hans Zimmer who with further research I found is a top composer for hundreds of titles such as Hannibal, Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

Something that particularly caught my eye here was that I had analysed the teaser trailer of Hannibal in my original individual research and so I looked for the soundtack -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWzelYim1G4

Many of the pieces by Zimmer from the film can be found on youtube, above being just one of them, 'Virtue'. For this film, he has used mostly cellos and basses, choosing to play them at extreme ends of their range. He said in an interview this was because "Anthony's character is for me somebody at the extreme range of whatever is humanly imaginable somehow." As we are focusing on a psychlogically disturbed person in our production, this relates a lot to our work. The pieces themselves are of a lot lower pitch, and much more haunting than his work from the DaVinci Code. If we were to create our own pieces, we would probably try to work around pieces like these, moreso than his higher pitched compositions.

Other ideas for the soundtrack music genres we would be looking at were fairytale-like instrumentals to create an image of the naivity portrayed through our female protaganist (child). We liked the idea of music generally beginning slower and then gaining pace, but not in an action/thriller soundtrack context.

Moving away from music and soundtrack, we will also have to focus a lot of actual diagetic and non-diagetic sounds. Important ones being footsteps that we intend to use of the suspect, and how we will synchronise it to the footage, as well as speeding it up as the beat increases, and also the heavy breathing or heartbeat that may be heard towards the end of our trailer.

As we begin to explore the music available to us, and the programmes that we can use to create our own soundtracks, our ideas may change, so we will experiment with the genres and pitches further as our project progresses.