Music

The music for our film production was one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of the production. We began the project assuming that we would be able to use any musical piece we wanted. To this end we decided on a song from a game to use early in the planning stages of our production. When we began filming, some of the scenes we filmed were filmed to fit that music.

This is the music originally wanted to use:


However, as the project went on we were told that this was not the case and that we were only allowed to use copyright free music. After we found this out, we then had to find a suitable piece of music that was similar to our original idea and had a feel and pace as good as for close to it, but was from a copyright free source. Our teacher provided us with a list of websites that had a range of songs that were available for use free of copyright. Whilst looking on these websites we sent an email to the company that produces the music we wanted: Valve.

From: Alex Thomson
(alext92@hotmail.co.uk)
Sent: 23 January 2009 12:01:53
To: contact@valvesoftware.com

Dear Sir/MadamI am currently attending the Sixth Form at Beauchamps High School in Essex, England and studying Media A levels As part of the course a group of us have to produce an opening sequence for a fiction film.We have so far finished the filming and the film is in the post production stage.At the beginning of the course, we were told that we were able to use any music we wanted in the film piece, and we thought that your main theme from Team Fortress 2 would be a good piece to use as it fits the pace and genre of our film really well. However, we have recently heard that we are unable to use music unless we got it from a copyright free source. This was a big problem for our group as we had already had chosen, and based our film-work around the music.It was therefore suggested to us, by our teacher to contact you and ask for permission to use the Team Fortress 2 main theme. If we gained this permission, and provided evidence it would be acceptable to the exam board for us to use the music.As this a school course it will be a non-profit production and used purely for educational purposes; our audience will be the teacher and the exam moderator at OCR. The work will not be reproduced outside this context. Please consider my request, thanks. If this is not the correct contact address for this problem then it would be very helpful to me if you could put me in contact with the correct people. Yours sincerely
Alex Thomson
Unfortunately, after sending this e-mail to Valve, we received no reply and after three weeks of waiting we gave up on ever getting a reply from them. This was very disappointing as we had to go with the less suitable music choice from the free music websites.

The music tracks we chose were from freeplaymusic.com and are called Wings of the wind, a calm track we indented to use for the first scenes of the character waking up. The second song we chose to use is titled; Bounty. This song would be used for the main race scenes, we chose this song for its fast pace and similarity to our original idea.

In the first scenes of our production piece, the character is just waking up in the morning as such we wanted to portray a stereotypical morning scene. This music is good for this purpose. Also it was important for the music to be very light, calm and contrastable to our other music for the race scenes. The switch between these two songs is also very important, as it marks the point at which we see the characters determination for the biker bike race. The race music reflects the sense of speed and determination we wanted for our characters and the scenes in general.

The downloaded files from the website were in M4A format, so we had to use the Xillisoft Audio Maker Software to convert them into MP3’s so they would be compatible with the Adobe editing software we were using.

The end result of the music, while not being what we originally wanted, and therefore not as good as it could be, was still quite good and overall we are pleased and happy with the end result


-Alex Thomson