Soundtrack Research

For our production we are planning to get one of our friends to help create our soundtrack, as this way we can have control over the music in our film and tailor it to suit our needs. We can guide the composer to create music that matches the mood of the scene and what the audience is seeing onscreen. This will allow us to make it tense at the right moments. The soundtrack is important in making the film look as professional as possible, and a soundtrack that is unfitting to the action takes away the realism of the film. I have been looking at similar films to ours and researching what kind of music they used for their soundtrack, so we can guide our composer into what tone of music we intend on using. We don't want our background music to overpower the shots but support them so the music adds tone and atmosphere to the scene.

Our production is part of the action genre. It is conventional for action films to use an orchestral score or an electronic sounding score for their films. Big Hollywood blockbusters and most superhero films use an orchestral score such as the recent Man of Steel, whereas gritty and dark action films like Blitz with Jason Statham or Drive with Ryan Gosling use an electronic-sounding soundtrack. Orchestral music is good at building tension and anticipation within the audience. Electronic soundtracks are used to excite the audience either building up to, during, or just after an action sequence.

This is an example of an orchestral soundtrack, composed by Hans Zimmer for The Dark Knight.

My group may be using a soundtrack quite similar to this, as we want to let the audience know in the opening establishing shots of our main character that something exciting is being built up to. Without the background music to set the tone, the audience could mistake the opening of our production to be simply a man on his way back from work rather than a spy holding something important in his briefcase. 

This is an example of the more electronic and gritty sounding background music, used for the film Blitz.

The music used in the opening titles of Blitz is very fast paced to excite the audience and build anticipation. In the more fast paced moments of our opening scene where there is a brief chase between our 2 characters, we aim to use music with this sort of pace as well. We want this music to build to a sharp cut to black to end our opening scene when our main character is about to be killed.