Trailer Music

Making trailers is a real art form and I'm the type that likes to get to the theater early to watch trailers before movies. I'm fascinated by how trailers cut a movie down to two minutes and get you excited to watch. Although sometimes they reveal too many of the best parts of a movie, they are a marketing tool and are created to sell a movie.

I also love how epic and intense trailer music can be. It's not just background music that has to avoid intruding on a scene, it's all out emotion and energy to grab your attention. In the last year I've gotten to create music for four trailers, and had a fun time working on them.

Peacock

The most prominent one was for Lionsgate's Peacock, which stars Cillian Murphy, Ellen Page (both of whom were in Inception, one of my favorite movies this summer), and Susan Sarandon. It's a creepy thriller about a guy with a dual identity. When I first got the trailer with temp music from the trailer house, the first 30 seconds had been temped with music from Chris Young's score to The Glass House and the rest of the trailer with other random bits of suspenseful music from other movies. Fortunately I was a student of Chris Young at USC, and I'm very familiar with his style. It's a good thing the music supervisor loved my take on Chris Young's sound, and even told me she liked it better than the temp.

The second half of the trailer which leads to the big buildup and cut to black and the Peacock title was temped with suspenseful music with a woodwind tune. I didn't want to stray too far from the temp so I maintained a similar tempo and orchestration with my own original tune. However the notes I got from the studio were simply to make it "bigger". So with each round of changes I was adding more and more brass and percussion to the point where the final trailer sounds more like an action film than a psychological thriller. But then again, that's what sells a movie.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPEzcAG4E5s Noche Sin Cielo

This is my most recent trailer for an upcoming movie to be released in Mexico, Noche Sin Cielo. It is the second feature directed by Benjamin Williams, who I previously worked with on J-ok'el. I'm pretty excited about scoring this movie later in the year, and the teaser trailer just gives you a hint of the epic nature of the film, which is about a UFO crash-landing on a freeway. I'm fond of sci-fi  and I'm thrilled to be scoring my first feature length sci-fi movie.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPqVYiGL9Vk LA Asian Pacific Film Festival

I posted this a while back but it is still one of my favorite pieces of music, where I had complete creative freedom to write music without having to compete with sound effects and dialogue in this beautiful piece of animation.

Video: http://vimeo.com/11192246 Do You Dream in Color

This trailer was created to raise funds for an uplifting documentary about blind high school kids and their dreams. We were going for a fun upbeat rock feel similar to the trailer from another documentary called American Teen. This was one of those truly joyful projects, so just watch the trailer, it's hard not to smile.

Video: http://vimeo.com/4757398