Soundtrack for Alien

I had a lesson on making a soundtrack for a film trailer. I had three different film trailers to choose from, they were, Alien (1979), The Lion King and Mission Impossible. I chose to use the Alien film trailer because it seemed to be the one that I was more interested in making a soundtrack for. Some of the different musical genres I though of that suited the mood/style of the film well were science fiction, suspense, horror, fast-paced. I watched the trailer before I started making my soundtrack, and I found out that the beginning of the trailer starts off black and slowly the camera cranes over a planet with space type music, which is what I did to start off my soundtrack. After about 20-30 seconds the trailer quickly increases in speed and the music tempo increases also, which shows that this film is an action/horror with suspense and fear. I also changed the tempo of the music higher to fit in well with the suspense. I decided to use a few different atmospheric loops throughout my soundtrack because I wanted to set a scary atmosphere to fit in well with the genre of the film. I also used a drum beat over the top which continues most of the way through the track; I decided to do this to make the music more fast and up tempo to fit in with what was happening on the screen. Below is a video which I created using final cut, of my soundtrack playing over the film trailer for Alien (1979). 

Avdvert Track

In this lesson I had to get in a group of 3 and come up with an idea for an advert. Firstly I got into a group with Tom and Martin. We had to listen to a range of different adverts from the website, http://www.radiospecialists.com/. One if the adverts that I looked at was called Man to Man, which didn't really catch my attention because it seemed like and old peoples advert. I thought this because by the way the narrator was speaking, he sounded posh and old. Also the picture had old people in an old house, which showed that it was set in the past. After watching some adverts we started to come up with ideas. We came up with an idea that promotes a chicken restaurant called 'Kill That Chicken'. We decided that we would be talking about the 3 new chicken flavours that the restaurant is starting to sell, BBQ, Southern Fried and Jerk were the 3 flavours that we came up with. We had to create a short script to use in our advert. Tom and Martin were the 2 people who were being recorded reading the script and I was recording them using microphones which were all connected up to logic and ready to record.

After we recorded the speaking parts we created a track to go on top. We created 3 different tracks to go along with the flavour of chicken, for example, for the BBQ flavour we decided to create a Texas sounding track using different loops. We also added in some different sound effects of chickens and a frying pan sizzling. Once we had finished editing and finalising our track we showed the rest of our group, who said that it was good and funny. Using the bluetooth device on the mac computers we sent the finished track to our mobiles after we had bounced it into an MP3 file.

First Piece on Logic Pro

For my first piece on logic pro I decided to make a sort of R&B style of song. I decided to pick this style of music because I like the style of music and I like the beats that are involved in this style. As this was my first ever piece on logic I didn't really have a great understanding of how to use all the loops and the mixer, etc. So therefore this song is quite basic with only 5 different tracks and loops. Although its basic I think that it is good and simple but affective. I also added on a recording of a girl in my group called Makala playing the acoustic guitar to a Tracey Chapman song. I think this makes the song even better because I recorded her playing myself and I have now got a better understanding of how to use logic pro and how to record an instrument and then transfer it all into logic and create a track. below is a video which I have also created using Final Cut, which has a print screen of my track from logic with my track playing over the top. I bounced my track into an MP3 file, then took a print screen and imported them both into final and just put them both on the time line and then exported it using quick time conversion.