The Effect of Sound

When picking a song to go in the background of our final piece, we didn't want to just use anything. The soundtrack to a movie is massively important as it can set the entire feel and give off certain emotions that are key to a film being successful. To try and get a feel of how music can change an movie I decided to experiment with some footage I put together of me and my friends skating. I then changed the background music to see what effect it had on the overall effect of the clips.      


  
For the first one I used the song 'Us' by Regina Spektor. It is quiet a mellow song and so makes to footage appear quiet relaxed and chilled out. It also gives it quiet a friendly feel (maybe because of the lyrics) and makes the three of us look like very close.











The next song I used ('Sleepyhead' remixed by Borgore) was much faster and so made the video seem much more frantic and high octane, even though the images being shown are exactly the same. After I did this it became very clear that I had to be careful with what music we used in our final piece. If we chose something wrong it could give off completely the wrong feel and possibly ruin what we are trying to achieve.

Now all I have to do is pick a song that will fit but also doesn't break any copyright laws. First, we thought about making a completely new song using a programme called 'Fruit Loops'. However, none of us have had much experience using this and we didn't believe we could make a song that sounded professional enough and that also fitted in with the genre of the movie. I then remembered I had recordings from a band I used to be in a few years ago. Because its my music that I have helped write and perform, I have the writes to use it as I wish.

   The recordings are very heavy music and could fit in well if I used them at the right place. They would give the movie a very energetic feel and hopefully really improve the quality of our final piece. If this song doesn't work, we found another song we liked on an online skate edit by an artist called Poppa Wheelie. After emailing him over myspace we found out he is non-profit based and makes songs purely for fun.

UPDATE

After showing the song we wished to use in our final piece to my teacher, he told us that it in fact sampled quiet alot from a Depeche Mode song called Waiting for the Night. We now need to look into a different area of copyright, the part concerning remixes.

   We found that a remix does not breach copyright laws if it is considerably different enough from the original i.e. it isn't just the same song with a different tempo or played on a different instrument. Luckily, Poppa Wheelie's remix also includes a different background beat and more vocals and so shouldn't break any laws.