Sound/Music Research

Before creating our music, we decided to play current music over the top of the footage, to see which style of music would fit best. 

Firstly, we tried Lana Del Ray's "Video Games".  Her music is slow and calming.  When watching the footage, it created quite and emotional piece.  We felt that the film needed to be cheeky and lively.  Also, some of our shots are quite quick paced, and the music did not enhance the rhythm of the footage.



We then tried Bon Iver's "Holocene".  His music is faster, and more upbeat.  When watching the footage with the music it fitted the rhythm of the shots perfectly.  The guitar and slurred, smooth vocals really made the piece feel like it was travelling and flowing smoothly.  The major key of the music made the film full of life, rather than de-saturated.  The saturated sounds also suited the bright colours of the lights. 

We then tried to re-create this acoustic sound in Garageband.  I was struggling to make a 3 minute song using the Garageband loops.  A friend suggested we use his updated version on his ipad. 

I used "Smartguitar" to create our guitar sound.  Whereas in garageband on our school macs limits you to the loops, this version enabled me to choose my own chords, beats and pace of the music. 

For example, I used the chord sequence, CGCFCG.  This is more free than the loops, which are in locked keys that cannot be changed easily. 

After creating the guitar part, I then added some beats.

After creating my drum and guitar sections, I exported the song to itunes and then imported it into premiere to go with our footage. 

Final song is below....

We also decided that it would be nice to maintain some natural sounds within the film to introduce different locations and forms of travel.  We added sea and seagull sound effects to the beach scene and traffic sounds to the road scenes.  This made the film flow more from scene to scene and also gave it a sense of travel and taking a journey.