Sound Planning

Choosing a soundtrack or several pieces of music to feature in my trailer is a crucial step in developing my final product into a high standard piece of work. Music and sound can create emotions and provoke responses from the audience and therefore the songs that I choose will have a major impact on how my audience reacts to my trailer. Given that my genre is ultimately a hybrid of thriller and horror, the primary genre is thriller because there are no directly scary elements to it - it's more of a psychological thriller with mysterious elements which is why I believe the genre of thriller should be used to sum up my work overall. A major element of this genre that I want to transfer to my work is the reactions and emotions of the audience, I want them to feel the tension and suspense that I am trying to create with my work and therefore I am going to need to carefully select the music that I want to use.

The software I will use to download my music is the website Incompetech which allows students like myself to download royalty free music with no copyright issues attached. It's a free and easy to use site and therefore I will be using it to contribute to my coursework. I feel it will be more appropriate for me to decide on the final music I will use once I have filmed enough scenes and put together a sequence of my trailer on Final Cut Express as this way I can test the music and see if it fits well and then go on to edit various scenes to match certain tones and pitches e.c.t. Therefore I will ultimately test out my music once I am further along in my editing process although I felt it was important to compose this post to show how I am going to go about getting the music to use in my trailer.

My plan is to have several different compositions to make up the sound that will work best with my footage. I want the music to start of slow and create a calm and tension filled atmosphere and then slowly build to a point where it is moving at a faster pace which at this point the footage will match the speed of the sound.Through research I have discovered a variety of websites that offer royalty free sound effects that will be useful in helping me search for specific sounds that I need to incorporate into certain parts of my trailer. The sounds that I require are certain ambient tracks that will help maximize the thriller atmosphere that I need to create within my work.

Although I am going to mostly use royalty free music and sounds in my work there is a particular song that I want to use as the main opening soundtrack in my work. The type of music is perfect to set the scene and tone of my trailer and this song is 'You Don't Know How Lucky You Are' by artist Keaton Henson. To be able to use this piece of music I am going to email the record company asking for their permission.

Furthermore, I found a sound effect of a reminiscent sounding montage of a girl laughing  which would be perfect for the flashback scenes in my trailer. The girl who created it said she was happy for people to use the audio for whatever they wanted but just to double check, I emailed herself.