Music and Audio in the Main Task Production

I have the task of creating the music for our own thriller production. To begin with I decided to look at successful thriller movie opening sequences and analysed the audio to find out what worked well in various opening sequences. I started by looking at action/thriller films such as Casino Royale and The Dark Knight to get an idea of the techniques and conventions used in the audio for this genre of thriller. What I found is that they both have background music of a slow pace that increases in volume and tempo as something changes in the action of the visual such as, James Bond fighting another character and the jokers thugs storming into the bank. I felt that this music was successful for the film but this type was not what we wanted for our film as we wanted a twist in the audio representation of what will be visible on screen. However, I did feel that incorporating the use of quick snappy suspense audio such as intensely strung violins would work well with our visual work. Therefore, from what I found out from the first analysis I then went on to look at other thriller films that use the similar strings audio to create suspense. This included such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Marnie’ and looking at the intensity of the synchronous audio (bird sounds) in ‘The Birds’. From looking at the opening sequence of ‘Marnie’ we decided that the audio for the opening sequence should have a twist just like the audio in ‘American Psycho’. It will also have other diagetic audio such as rain effects.

I have now finished creating the audio to match our opening sequence and after getting feedback from my group and a selected audience, we agreed that it works well with the visual work in the opening sequence of our production. I think that the suspense string audio clips work well to create tension for our thriller production. On the other hand, I think that there is an unfortunate slight bad transition between two clips of audio, however, I will deal with this by adding another sound effect to mask this.