Music Research

Within our trailer we wanted to use music that not only reflected the genre and period but made the audience actually want to listen and/or buy the track if it came available. Our research took us all over YouTube; different tribute acts and Garage band on the macs.

Due to copyright reasons if we were to use a real band or tribute act we would have to have permission and in some cases we would have had to pay them for their tracks. This said we discovered that making or finding the right music was going to be very hard and time consuming. We started our research with ideas flying through the air and not going into much detail and when we finally decided upon a female singer and we had a starting point.

The female singer was going to perform on stage similar to the actual 50’s where you see them singing on stage in clubs and bars. Therefore to fit in with the time period we needed a song that was slow and meaningful. We decided that our singer would mime while filming and then we would dub the voice over after and if we were not satisfied with the outcome we were willing to re-film that section of the film.

We looked into several tribute acts that we came across through our work and we decided to look further into their style. The first was ‘John Lloyd’ a tribute act to Michael Buble and other artists, his style was good for a different genre but however it wasn’t what we wanted and therefore we looked for an alternative. The second tribute act was ‘The Motown Sisters’ again we heard about this through work and decided to look them up on YouTube, the video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mjVBqT0NFg and although they were good in their own right, they didn’t tick the boxes for us in terms of genre and time period.

Through our research we found that the female singer crept up in a number of Noir films and therefore this was the obvious route for us to take. This video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb0AeoWrepA showed us the sort of music we should try to re-create. The Tennessee Waltz by Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King was very helpful and we through it would fit our genre the best but due to copyright reasons we couldn’t use the song out right and therefore we would have to attempt to re-make something similar on garage band or with instruments.

Garage Band allowed us to explore many different styles; genres and instruments. We have previously played around with the programme and have learnt the basics but in order to make something professional on the programme we would need a lot more practice which again is something we as a group are willing to do.

We knew that making music was a tough job and we wanted to spend time on making something believable and professional and the research we have undertaken has helped us decide on the path to take for our own trailer.