I decided to practice the art of music and the moving image by taking a Star Craft trailer without a score.
when I approached the trailer score, I wanted the music to function for the trailer by deliver tonality. I also wanted to have a brand new take on the score, I didn’t watch any official Star Craft trailers to pick ideas from and to warp my creative choices. I also wanted to focus on melody, creating several phrases and a main theme, heard when the man is walking on the platform and at the end credits.
I began the project by importing the video into Pro Tools. I decided I would write down the timecode’s of music cue’s in a notepad, after writing the timecode I would write down idea’s for the music. For example when the film cuts to the man stepping into the boots, I wrote “01:27:17 action music starts… building, toms”. The numbers at the start is the timecode and I wrote my notes beside the timecode. This helped me organise where music cues would be and how long they would they would last. Adding descriptions for what would happen at cues made writing the music more purposeful. For example; The cue after 01:27:17 is at 01:55:05 and the description is “Hero music”. This is the scene where the platform starts to raise. I thought the shot looked epic and the viewer got a good look at the hero. To portray this in the music, I focused on major chords to lift the music up and change the mood from tense to epic. Adding the short descriptions let me know what harmonies to use.
Each music cue has it’s own tempo, this is so the music fits to the film. Using tempo operations in Pro Tools is the way in which I got the correct tempo for each section of the trailer. To do this I click on events, tempo operations, constant. You must click advanced before you can do this. You have to do them in order, after you’ve entered your tempo changes you can edit them later. start on bar 0|0 (this will appear under start and beside selection) and then enter the timecode for your first cue (under end and beside timecode). change the end bar (under end and selection) to desired bar. This will create a calculate a tempo, if this is the desired tempo you want press apply.
For the rock sections of the track I recorded through a 30 watt VOX Valvetronix VT20+. I placed a sE2200a condenser microphone 3-4 inches from the centre of the cone and 3-4 inches from the cone. This gave a low, darker tone to the distorted guitar. I recorded a second guitar through the same amp (If I had another amp available to me I would of record through that) I used an MXL 441 condenser cardioid microphone. I pointed the microphone towards the centre of the cone from a 45 degree angle about 4 inches away from the cone. I choose this because I made a very warm sound with a lot of definition.
The synth elements I played my Microkorg XL directly through my mixer. This gave me a purer sound. The main synth sound (That can be heard as the music is first played) was manipulated by WS depth which effected the saturation of the sound by pushing the sound waves further apart.
I used compression on every instrument on this track to squash the dynamics making the tracks more present in the mix. The ratio determines how much the track is compressed. I’ve got a 7:8 ration on my percussion track. For ever 7 Db that passes the threshold 8 dB is pushed down. This makes the peaks softer. I did this because it worked well with the type of electronic percussion. and kept it present in the mix. Once compressed I pushed the gain up by 2dB to increase the volume of the track. I’ve used an EQ on this track, I have taken out the low frequencies. I have set the Freq to 57.8 Hz and set the gain to -23.5 dB to take out most of the sub frequencies and left some room for the percussive bass frequencies at 60Hz. This helped taken the muddiness out the mix.
To balance the rock part of the trailer the guitars I recorded were panned hard left and hard right, this helps give maximum stereo width (I did the same with the Horns and the strings). To help balance the track some frequency tracks bass and kick drum I had a compression on the Bass guitar track that was triggered by the kick drum, this is the technique called side compression. This would reduce the bass guitars volume every time the kick played.
To add more punch to the drums I set up a bus that went to a heavily compressed tracks with a quick release. This makes the drums really present. I mixed in the compressed Aux track to preference.
Practicing to this trailer has encouraged me to try new things and grow as a film composer and I’m glad I took the time time create something I’m proud of. I will carry on to find projects to work on before heading to university in late summer.
