Music within Epidemic.

For our film we wanted to create our own music in order to give our film a sense of individuality and to give it a cutting edge over other films being made within our class. Certain members of our group (Callum) were musically talented and therefore we thought we would use this to our advantage.

As stated in a previous post music can really change the feel of a film drastically and is very important in media today. Almost every film has music of some kind involved in, either to set the scene, mood or just to play in the background to make it more exiting. The bottom line is a film needs music and that means our film needs music too. First we researched music in similar films and tv series one of which was the walking dead. In the walking dead, we had to watch a while before they had music on but when they did it was slow background music to set the mood therefore I knew we had to have slow music to establish or scene but in terms of other music it was usually just to set the scene. We also looked into 28 days later and there is background music that is very intense also to set the scene. After watching this we knew that in our film we had to have some sort of background music to set the scene.

In the first scene there is no music whatsoever due to the fact it’s a news broadcast and we figured that you need to listen to the broadcast and not be distracted by any music. This was different to one of the title sequences we researched as that had music in but as we stated (in the Analysing the News Broadcast post) we wanted to resemble the broadcast by the BBC and that is what we did.

In the second scene we composed our own piece of music that is very slow and has a depressing mood.  The music takes place in the shot where the main character is getting out of bed and walking towards the door but stops when he is being sick. The music was composed and recorded on the piano consists of an A Minor chord and a G Major chord. The reason for the use of these chords is that we wanted to create a depressing yet perhaps hopeful tune to set the mood of the scene and the slow transition of the chords without a melody do such a good job of creating this mood and to show the slow pace movement. The reason we used only a piano was to keep it simple and small yet still meaningful.

In the third scene we had a piece of action music we downloaded from the Internet. The reason we downloaded it rather than composed it this time is because we don’t have the skill and talent in all music areas also we didn’t have the time to add it in so we downloaded action music and cropped it and repeated it until it sounded right then faded it out in the end. The reason we chose to put music here was because of our lack of good shots. We really struggled when editing the third scene because the shots we had weren’t good enough as people looked at the camera or did it wrong or we didn’t have time too retake it so much. But regardless we didn’t have the shots we needed meaning we had to jump cut a lot of the scene at the end and it looked terrible on it’s own without any music so something had to be done. We downloaded some fast action music and we had to look really hard to find one we liked but eventually we did but it was only a section of the song that worked well so we cut that out and replayed it  to make it longer. But we were very happy with the result. Although it would have been better if we composed it ourselves but that just wasn’t possible.

And finally we had music on the title sequence. See the title sequence post for more information about this.