Music research

We looked at numerous action trailers and discovered that music plays a vital role in creating the atmosphere and emphasizing the action. For example we watched the trailer for Gamer. The trailer incorporates diegetic sound of sound effects like sirens and music from artists such as “Marilyn Manson.” The first thirty seconds of the trailer rely on the various sound effects and voiceovers. After a brief build up the titles come in and the song “Sweet Dreams” by Marilyn Manson begins playing. At first it is a slow, soft acoustic melody with the titles fading in and out over the top. As soon as the action starts the guitar turns into a heavy fast paced track. As the voiceovers come in explaining the background story the song goes fades slightly and goes back to the slow acoustic riff, but kicks back in with the heavy guitar riff when the action picks up. This method means that the music perfectly compliments the on screen action.

However not all films rely on a song by a famous artist. Inglorious Basterds starts with a non diagetic soundtrack playing softly in the background while diegetic speech can be heard. Sounds effects can be heard to compliment the writing on screen as well. However when the action picks up later in the trailer the musical score adds some upbeat drums and distorted guitar. It seems that many action films featured a soundtrack or score with rock music for example : The matrix, transformers, crank and ironman.As we watched more and more trailers we learnt just how key music is to a film. We knew that any music in our trailer would have to be copyright free music so we looked on the Internet to see what options we had. First of all we looked on www.royaltyfreemusic.com. There were a few songs here that we thought would fit well with our trailer,particularly Final Goal. The problem with the song was that the sponsors kept saying their name over the top of the song every 5 seconds so we quickly disregarded it. It quickly became apparent that this was the case on all song from this website so we decided to try a different website. after trying several other site with no luck we tried www.freeplaymusic.com. This was by far the best website we had tried. The first song we found was called Bouncing. But after all of the group had heard it we decided it wouldn't be suitable for our film. The next three we found were exactly what we were looking for. These were titled "Eliminator", "Mugshot" and "Apocalypse". We then listened to each song as a group and decided which bits from each track would sound good in our trailer and really compliment the piece. These tracks all have the hard rock sound that many action films use, however they didn't really have any softer parts. Another look on Freeplaymusic brought up some tracks that had an almost espionage sound to them which we felt would fit perfectly with our trailer and the rock music we had already found. These tracks were "Only Human" and "On the Trigger."