Music Blog: Figuring out the beats

    When I first had the idea of creating a horror movie intro, I knew I wasn't going to use popular music or any song that has lyrics. This was because I wanted to take inspiration of the Scream 1 intro which rather than letting scenes play out with popular music in the background, let the silence, dialogue, and occasional non-diegetic sound or song play. This created the perfect atmosphere of tension in my opinion that made the beginning of the movie to be so well known. Since I drew most of the inspiration from Scream 1 I made sure to follow its "rule" of audio. In my case that meant letting, as what I previously described, let the silence, dialogue, and occasional non-diegetic sound or song play.

    With the majority of the film already completed, I observed each scene I had created meticulously. I figured I wanted the beginning to establish the theme and story I wanted to present to the audience. My choice of doing this through the audio was by putting in an voice-over of a memo the MC had previously recorded. I as well wanted to add missing sounds from the original footage such as cricket-like sound and a quiet horror-esque theme. How I wrapped up that scene was adding a strong tense build up of bass that got louder and then suddenly stopping. 

(Above is an image of one of my team members emails to an artist for a possible pick of music)

    Reason was that the murderer would have just been revealed and I wanted to change the song but also make it seamless. My change in song was to try and cause more tension in the chase scene by adding a 8-bit music, which just like the rest of the music, was copyright free. This quickly ended by the up coming bump of victim #2 and the detective. Now I could've put underlying motif's or some sort of song that built the implication that this murderer was still lurking or chasing. However I didn't feel like it would fit because I wanted the audio of the conversation to be completely audible.

    Once the conversation, the second chase began. I could use the same song I did for the first scene, however I decided against it. This was mainly because I needed to change of the vibe as this scene would be more of a realization to the viewers and detective the true danger he was in. I chose a song with a build up of what sounded like a harsh violin and then playing classic chase scene notes. The rest of the footage was unedited at this point but from what I could see it fit like a glove and I was satisfied with where it started and how it sounded.