The music generally glues everything together and sets the mood/tone of the trailer.
It also needs to be fairly static dynamically, as it is up against a barrage of voice overs, sound effects and busy images. Usually they are looking for music that is impactful, not too complex in nature, or too busy in arrangement. Thomas: It depends entirely on the movie, the angle of the marketing campaign, the preferences of directors, producers and marketing teams, etc. What qualities is the customer, director, or studio looking for when they pick trailer music?
Very often if you can write orchestral music that is self-sufficient, it tends to be very suitable and functional when married to picture. TSFH has grown from being a music library catering to movie advertisement campaigns, into a full blown artist/band, and CD Baby has been a big part of facilitating this change.
We really try to write music that stands on its own feet, rather than something written to support picture. It is often orchestral and choral in nature. However, the music that we have written at Two Steps From Hell does not follow this format, rather the format of a typical pop song, which makes it more interesting to the typical listener outside of a trailer context. Since trailers follow a certain format, generally starting low key and building over the course of the 2 or so minutes of its duration, the music is produced to support that format.
Thomas: Trailer music is really any music synchronized to a motion picture advertisement campaign, usually divided into full length (around 2 minutes long) “theatrical,” “international,” and tv spots (usually around 30 seconds long specifically for TV). Here’s what they had to say: An Interview with Two Steps from HellĬD Baby: What IS trailer music? And why do studios use trailer music? I thought it’d be interesting to ask the guys in Two Steps from Hell the same questions that I posed to Carol from audiomachine to see how their processes or attitudes might differ. Their albums have been top-sellers in the iTunes Classical section for over two years, and recently their Google search popularity was on par with famed film-composer Hans Zimmer– no small feat! In Part 2, I interview Thomas Bergersen and Nick Phoenix from Two Steps from Hell, a duo of composers who united in 2006 to write music for film and film trailers (Brave, Madagascar 3, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Avengers, The Bourne Legacy, etc.).
In the world of viral videos, the art of film and game trailers has taken on a life of its own– and there’s good money to be made composing the “cues” for those previews.īut how do you get into the film trailer game, find licensing opportunities, work with studios, and deliver quality music on a deadline? In Part 1 of this series, I interviewed Carol Sovinski of audiomachine, a boutique music production house that creates music for film and game trailers.