SOUND WITHIN OUR TRAILER

A common convention of soap opera trailers, is that they use little or no spoken dialogue within them. Following this convention then left us with a silent trailer, which we didn't want, so we then had to start considering music and sound effects for our piece. Before we started to choose suitable sound tracks, we had to make sure all the sounds we were considering were royalty free so we didn't infringe on any copyrighting laws.
As a group we decided we wanted two sound effects and a music track within our trailer.

Our idea was to have a contrast in the tone of the trailer, between what happens before the punch and the shots after this event happens. We thought music would allow us to display and highlight this change.
For our opening clips of the church and the tilt of the 'Cherry Garden Road' sign, we decided to include church bells as a sound effect. We thought this would work as the clip of the church would make the music relevant and would put it into context of the piece. We also thought that by having the bells, it would make the audience anticipate happy scenes, such as a wedding, so they are even more socked when the mood of the trailer changes shortly after.

After this section, the next part of the trailer is introduced through a boy punching the character of Marris. We discussed if we should add a sound effect to this part, or if the use of silence would be more effective, we finally decided that we would use sound as we hoped it would add to the impact of this part. We searched through all the appropriate sounds available on the software we used, Imovie. We found out that there wasn't any that sounded like a punch, but there was one noise which we felt fitted perfectly with the clip. Although it didn't sound how you would imagine a punch to sound, we liked the impact and effect it brings to the trailer, and it doesn't seem out of place.

For the rest of the trailer we wanted a soundtrack that would run right up until the end of the piece, this meant the music track would have to be about 50 seconds long. With this in mind we starting to listen to sounds of about this length. We were not sure what music style we wanted yet, so we tried many different tracks with the trailer to see what fitted and matched with the clips. As this would be a non-diegetic piece of music to co-inside with the visual side, it didn't have to sound realistic to the setting, so we could be quite open with the types of sounds we were testing. In the end we decided upon a certain track that we felt worked well and helped convey our aims of the trailer. Our sound track has been described as religious by some of our audience members, but we think this suits the trailer, as you could link it with the church bells at the start, yet it's still a huge contrast. It also could connote that Marris is looking towards religion to help him in his situation.

-Amy Bowman