LO1: Writing Music for Heavy Metal

I’ve been writing two pieces of music for the Heavy Metal film. One piece is for a brief aerial chase scene and the other piece is for a fight scene. The first piece is being written like a standard 80s synthpop song as it has a unchanging tempo, beat and time signature throughout (It’s easy to clap along to). This style of soundtrack wasn’t unheard of in 80s movies – take The Neverending Story and Labyrinth for example. Although this piece will not strictly sync to every action in the visuals, it will loosely reflect each scene in each changing bar through changes in chords, dynamics and instrumentation.

The second piece is being written in a more classical manner. The tempo changes throughout and the music syncs to the visuals a lot more accurately (almost like foley). I’m writing it similarly to the example shown below (ThinkSpace Education, 2013). In the video, the composer is often playing music along to the visuals of the animation rather than a beat.

Although I’m writing these two pieces using different methods of composition, I’m aiming to make sure they share a lot of the same instruments in order to keep listeners from noticing. I’m writing in two different ways as a means of testing my writing abilities. However, I am confident that this won’t negatively impact my work as I have watched and enjoyed animations with various types of music used before. Take Thunderbirds, for example. It features a variety of easy-listening songs, which you can enjoy and clap along to with or without the visuals, as well as many strictly visual-orientated songs, which can be difficult to enjoy/understand without some form of visual context to accompany it (try listening to the song below for example).

References

ThinkSpace Education (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AyswacaFd0