Acquiring the audio

As part of putting together the Trailer we needed to add soundtrack as this is crucial for both creating an atmosphere and also building excitement - if a trailer lacks a memorable soundtrack then it will not be quite so successful as soundtrack evokes something within the viewer which makes it seem that much more appealing.

The first thing that I needed was to find a suitable website from which I could source soundtrack - as someone who does not have access to an orchestra ready to play whatever I demand of them I could either pull something that already existed (by asking the owners permission to use what is by copyright theirs) or I could find royalty free music that is open for anyone to use. Given that I found them to be a good source of soundtrack from previous projects I headed straight for Free Music Archive to find the soundtrack that I desired. In looking for tracks I needed:

1) something mournful and sad for the beginning
2) something darker and more disturbed for the moments in which Mya would freak out
3) Something sad yet hopeful for Mya's initial moments inside the Trory Anwir institute for mental health
4) Something momentous yet suspicious for the moments of discovery
5) and back to something else that was mournful and sad for the ending

Once I had found them I could look through their vast archive and find what it was that I needed. I felt that the titles for some of the songs were oddly very appropriate for their roles - for example, the track used for the opening is called "nothing lasts forever", or for the moments of discover is called "hidden castle" (Mya might not discover a castle but her discovery is still something hidden in its own way).

Now that job was done it was time to edit together the soundtrack and it turned out that this was not as simple as I first assumed it was going to be - I originally thought that all I would need to do was to put the soundtrack in where I needed it to go. As it turned out iMovie was very much all or nothing so I would need a second piece of software in order to put the final soundtrack together.

This piece of software was to be Audacity, which is specifically designed to edit together sound files to create new music and it was very useful. Using this had a few steps to it:

1) Inserting all of the audio into the program, when I had done so it looked like this:

As you can see this initially is not immediately a viable soundtrack to use because all 5 different tracks (all taken from Free Music archive, the original sounds and sound effects were added separately to the ambiance soundtracks that I was editing together here) will overlap and drown each other out.

2) Lining up the sound

As opposed to having different tracks overlap, I wanted to time the start and finish of each track so that they follow on from each other whilst beginning at the appropriate time in the trailer to create their desired effects. In order to make sure that this was done right I needed to check their exact start times on the trailer and then listen to the Audacity file whilst watching the iMovie file to see if they line up correctly - given that it was two different machines this was very awkward but it worked well enough:

Once the job was done - and it looked something like this when it was (see below) - I was ready to transfer the finished product onto iMovie  - it fit together exactly as intended and, though perhaps some of the cuts are a little jumpy from track to track, its exactly what we needed in order to create the desired effect.