Brilio.net/en - For the past decades movie trailer has been one of the most important tools in movie industry, posing as a pitch to entice people to watch their movies. Without us realizing, the music for trailers has also evolved from the use of original soundtrack and score to use different music specially made by composers for the sole purpose of driving audiences to the movie, as reported by variety.com.
The trend is opening a door for a new business that is highly competitive. We cant do anything in marketing without music. Its the driving force for everything, explains Ann Mugglebee, president of Vibe Creative, a Culver City-based agency that specializes in producing TV spots and trailers for movies. When we get a job, the first go-to is the music. Theres always a lot of pressure to find the right cue. Most of the time, for editors, it starts with the music.
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The studio marketing departments outsource the job of creating trailers to companies that specialize in the trade, who are then able to turn the production-music libraries into what are known as coming attractions.
Most of the time, the composers of this music never even see the visual content. They used to send me the cut and Id just score it, says the Iceland-born composer Veigar Margeirsson. The guy who works at L.A.-based Pitch Hammer Music that specializes in trailer music says too many leaks have resulted in high security. Now they supply music based on ideas and suggestions from the trailer-producing companies who hire them.
Pitch Hammer creates about 100 new tracks a year, categorizing them as emotional drama, percussive action, aggressive action and a new, sound-design-based, non-tonal music they call trailer fuel.
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Music sets the tone, agrees head of music for Trailer Park Bobby Gumm. Trailer Park is a Hollywood-based company whose recent trailers include Captain America: Civil War, Zootopia and Finding Dory.
There are also covers to classic songs to use for trailers, depending on the project. For example, the upcoming Suicide Squad hired John Hanson of Confidential Music to come up with a cover of the Bee Gees I Started a Joke. Gumm was also the one who suggested a cover of Verdis Requiem for teaser of Mad Max: Fury Road. It is a classical-music choice that wound up in the movie itself. I was ecstatic, he says.
For The Jungle Book, Vibe approached The Hit House to create a cover of the classic song The Bare Necessities. What we do is, we make you feel, says Sally House, the executive producer of Hit House. We make you laugh, we make you cry. We make you go call your mom. (For The Jungle Book) we knew that we had to make you feel inspired.
There is additional tweaking when they want to use master recordings (the original hit records). House calls their approach trailerization: some sweetening, overlay or sound design, (often) to end with a huge sweeping arc at the end.
A surprising aspect of todays trailer music is the fact that few trailers sport a unified, cohesive score by a single composer. They typically dont use a full track, says Margeirsson. Theyll use two seconds of one track, three seconds of another, maybe 30 seconds of another, and maybe a track from one of our competitors.
In rare cases, the film composers themselves contribute to the trailer music. On the Batman movies, Hans Zimmer would send us stuff piecemeal as he was composing it, notes Gumm. Similar cases happened in Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone and Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailers in which the music provided by John Williams, while Michael Giacchino scored teasers for Ratatouille and Star Trek.
Trailers are like the last great frontier for music, explains Hit House composer Scott Miller. They just keep pushing the limits. They dont really want yesterdays music. They want tomorrows music. You cannot think big enough. For the budgets, it can vary widely from USD 5,000 to USD 2 million. The higher numbers generally reflecting the use of a top artist like Jay Z or U2.