MUSIC AND THE MEDIA: Create a Silent Movie.

As a group, we chose ‘horror’ as the genre for our short film.  We wanted to create our own music as our soundtrack, so selected a few instruments to help. Although we wanted the music to be heavily featured within the short film to create dramatic effect, we decided to keep it very simple, only using tuned percussion and a wooden guiro. Initially when we were discussing concepts and themes for our video, we had the idea of incorporating the use of leitmotifs to distinguish different characters within the film. However, on reflection was going to be too complex and so decided to just use a repeated few bars played on the tuned percussion, each time a character would enter the lift. I think this proved very effective in our piece, creating an atmosphere and building anticipation as the audience would begin to recognise the bars played and ultimately know and be able to predict what would happen to the next character.

When coming up with the short tune on the tuned percussion, we played a simple collection of notes in a minor key. which was effective in creating quite a scary atmosphere in attempt to make the audience uncomfortable and perhaps a bit scared.