Watchmen Trailer

In the past couple weeks, I have been working with Frederik to create a soundtrack and sound effects for a movie trailer. For the movie trailer, we have chosen to do the trailer for the movie Watchmen.

We have been using a computer program called mix craft to create the backing track and incorporate sound effects into the trailer. 

We have chosen to use a computer program as opposed to performing a piece live. We chose to use the computer program because it will have a larger amount of sounds to choose from and we can easily edit the piece to make it better. 

For the first twenty seconds of our piece. We incorporated a simple bass playing a single chord arpeggio which will be playing throughout the whole time. It starts at about 7 seconds. From the beginning of the song, a bass drum starts playing four times per bar and will also be played throughout the whole piece. It is a sort of drone.

For sound effects. We have incorporated the sound of thunder to our music piece. It is used in the beginning of the trailer when the introductory logos are shown and also at about 10 seconds in to the piece when a character transforms.

I have enjoyed working on this piece so far and will continue to work on it to make it much more detailed and advanced to the point where it is close to the standard of the original.




It has been 2 weeks since I had made that post, we have now completed our work. Our final result is great in my opinion. He had modified the original a lot and now is much better.

For one, we had removed the original bass arpeggio and instead added an arpeggio and drone on the keyboard. Frederik recorded the drones for the entire song and I recorded the arpeggio for the entire song. It had given the song a darker feel.

We had also altered the tempo in the song. Towards the end of the trailer, the amount of notes being played by the piano are twice as much as they were in the beginning. We chose to do it like that as we wouldn't have to alter other parts of the pieces tempo and they could stay the same.

We had also added voice over parts of the trailer and edited the sound to be 4 semitones lower than the original, this gave it a dark and serious feel.


The music piece can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBu0GY9SDAE

Music Composition

For this task we were asked to either work individually or in a pair. We were asked to create a piece of music that would go with a film that is either of the genre romantic or drama. I worked with my friend Hayato to create the following piece which is shown in the video below:

We used different elements of music such as arpeggios and a melody to go along with the track. We had 5 parts to our piece. The first part was a simple intro than consisted of a broken chord or arpeggio of the chord A minor. The part that was next was the first verse, we used a chord sequence of A minor, E minor, G major and D major. I played the chord sequence using arpeggios while Hayato played a melody. The next part was a sort of chorus, it had a different chord sequence to the verse. The chord sequence in the chorus consisted of A minor, G major, F major then G major again, this was repeated twice then the next part came in place. The second to last part was the same as the second, it consisted of the same melody and the same chord sequence, it was repeated twice just life the first instance of it. The last part was an ending. The ending was just a couple A minor chords played after each other, an octave higher each time until we reach a maximal A note.

I think we composed our piece very well, we used a range of different musical techniques. We made a piece of music  had a good structure that had 5 different parts to it. The length of the song is quite longer than most other groups, I believe. I think the piece sounded great overall.

To improve our piece, we can use even more musical techniques such as changing the tempo or using dynamics to change the volume. If we were to do this again, I would use dynamics which would result in a better piece overall. I look forward to creating more musical pieces.

Reflection

These first weeks in music we have been working on a piece of music to go along with a video clip from King Kong. I have worked alongside my colleagues, Frederik, Andrew and Abdul, to create a piece of music. In the end, I think we successfully created the piece as it suited well with its allocated clip. We accurately used both drones and an ostinato in our music piece. To do better next time we could reduce the amount of percussion instruments (drums) and add more melodic instruments.