Fiction Adaptation Soundtrack

I had decided before I'd even started doing the fiction adaptation part of the course that I should create the soundtrack to my fiction adaptation film.

The soundtrack I had chosen to create consists mostly of electronic noises with certain simple melodies that play and repeat throughout the five-minute film. I decided to go with the electronic sound as it gave a kind of 80s B-Movie sound which I felt would have worked well with the subject matter of my film and built the overall look of the film around this type of style.

All of the soundtrack was composed using 'Audacity' on my laptop and performed with an electric piano capable of making various sounds as well as using a mini synthesiser for parts of the soundtrack.

All of the tracks are very simple and quite short in length but I shall list of few of the more prominent ones and the inspirations behind them.

The Title Sequence:
Performed entirely through the mini synthesiser, this is the piece of music that I wanted to set the mood for the rest of my fiction adaptation pice. It starts off with the gentle strings but then the 'sawtooth' synthesiser sound comes in to bring in the main hook. I then used a slider to make the music sound like it was going out of tune and starting to fall. It then cuts out.

The Dream:
The music that plays over the protagonist's dream sequence after having the metal break-down was actually a piece of music I had created previously for testing. I managed to clean the audio up with noise reduction and added extra parts in, created a stereo mix as opposed to the mono mix it was using originally and faded parts in and out to avoid the 'popping sound' whenever a new instrument comes in. Thankfully, this piece fitted the seven very well and allowed me to successfully edit the footage around it.

The Bees:
As I have written in a previous blog post. I gained the idea for the use of the sound of bees from a Pink Floyd song, 'Hey You' which described worms (which sounded much more like bees) getting into somebody's brain. I decided that I would take inspiration from this and decided to mix two different pieces of stock sound of bees and changed them to various pitches for a strange stereo effect which I think works very well.

Here is a link to the song which gave this inspiration:

Pink Floyd had actually been the inspiration for the overall sound, from the distorted sound effects to the pieces of music. These were particularly inspired by their 1979 album, 'The Wall'.

The following video is taken from the film adaptation of 'The Wall' from 1982 and features the song, 'Empty Spaces/ What Shall We Do Now' which gives a clear example of the type of sound I was trying to replicate. I even made a piece of music that used the same basic beat but I ended up not using it in case of any copyright infringement:

Overall, I feel that the soundtrack works well with the footage. However, I do feel that I rushed it due to some time constraints and other responsibilities such as filming and perfecting the edit. Therefore the soundtrack is not as polished as I would have liked. Despite this, I am still happy with it how it is and might return to it out of interest and create a better, more polished soundtrack with more time.