titus keate home pre-production producing a film opening study notes and more
Music
As my partner is the more musically aligned of the two of us I will be directly phrasing their words for this first section.
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"For our film, I have undertaken the task of music production so we do not have to risk breaking any copyright infringement. To begin the composition process, I had to understand what kind of music would appear in a thriller film. Often slow tempo and tense ambient pieces make up the soundtracks to these films. I started the process by creating a 60 bpm project file in my DAW (digital audio workstation), FL Studio, and began by adjusting a synthesizer pad to create a sinister sounding main melody. I used a very simple drone (a common melody type for ambient pieces) for this pad. I then added percussion using various African drum samples to eventually take up more space in the mix in order to raise tension. I then added a reverse delay effect to these drums which created a more alien feel to the drums which fits into our themes of alienation in the first scene. I then layered stutters over the later section of the drums to create a glitchy sound which links into our use of computers as a driving factor in our plot. I then added a wide reverb to the pad to create a more ambient feel to it and added a phaser which comes in and out of the mix to add dynamics into the pad and to prevent tediousness. For our sound effects, I already have a pack of various royalty free sounds I can use for our post-production editing. Overall, from this task I have learned more about the way thriller films use ambient tracks to build tension and how to compose music for a broader film context rather than just as a song."
Sound
Thriller films focus on a main protagonist and then a threat they are trying to avoid. I believe an important aspect of fleshing out a threat, used, is giving it an associated sound/motif. With this we can either blatantly or subconsciously foreshadow the threats appearance within a scene. A good example is the electrical static linked to the black-lodge inhabitants In the television series Twin Peaks (1991) and subsequent film. This is why I'd really like to give our character, Devlin, a theme to play before both of his appearances within the opening. I'm hoping to experiment with chimes and digital effects to create a harsh but malleable melody to apply to our scenes.