Music and soundtrack - Elliott

Non-Diegetic soundtrack is perhaps the most important aspect of sound editing, in terms of how it controls the aesthetics of a scene, and encompasses all form of music that is added to the product post-production.

For our short film we have an added complication that big-budget productions do not run into: having to avoid copyright in our music choice as we don't have money to spend on licensing fees.


This is the Lord of the Rings 100 piece orchestra - showing what soundtracks
multi-million pound productions have access to.

Unlike Lord of the Rings, which had a budget of £57 million (source), we also cannot afford to hire an orchestra (surprising, I know) which leaves me 3 main options for sourcing music:

• Use music so old it does not fall under copyright law
• Use Royalty-Free music
• Record our own music specifically for this production

 

While there are undoubtedly some great songs that are old enough to avoid copyright, the main trouble is finding some in a style that fits with the themes of our short-film. One song that could work very well is, I believe, 18 with a bullet.

Using Royalty-Free music has it's own drawbacks in that it is normally of very substandard quality compared to normal music and using it could end up making the film sound completely unprofessional. To try and avoid this I hope to limit the amount of royalty free music to the sort of instrumental soundscapes that are (hopefully) of no noticeable quality drop

Recording our own music is another avenue to explore, whether it be with help from a friend of me and Ziaul who has a band or with my own, not so great, musical skills. The downside of using this method will be in the quality of the recording/mixing as we would obviously not have access to the inanely expensive equipment most recording studios use. One way I could get around this is by hiring a studio for the day such as this one in Brighton http://www.metwaystudios.co.uk/ however because of the amount of money I will have to spend on props I am reluctant to put down more cash for the project if I can avoid it.

Because of the drawbacks of all these methods I aim to go with hidden option 4 to source most of the music for this production:
This involves using the huge amount of unsigned potential of artists on the internet, especially YouTube. Because I have quite a large subscriber base on YouTube I hope to be able to get permission from smaller, but talented, artists to use their music for the film in return for promoting them to a larger audience. One limit of this is that most music artists that exist like this make only electronic style music which may cause trouble in finding the music that would fit our production.