Movie Trailers

These, the ads of films, have a pervasive use of sound, sometimes even more so than the finished film.

Let's for example think of teaser trailers. Those are the ones where there's (very) few images accompanied by words on a coloured background. You don't get to see much of the film but you will often get a booming voice over which echoes the inter title cards (things like "This summer ... " or "They shouldn't have messed with him/her ... ") used with powerful music.

A stereotypical trailer (for example, that for Danny Boyle's "Sunshine") will start out slow and rapidly speed up over its short length (the volume of music increasing at a similar rate). The aforementioned trailer uses Lux Aeterna by the Kronos Quartet & Clint Mansell (the "Requiem for a Dream" song also used for the "LOTR: the Two Towers" trailer). The film's nature ("the sun dies, we die") is encapsulated by this epic music and quick images of people in peril.

The trailer formaula could therefore be seen as: glimpses of scenes from a film + evocative (and complimentary music and voiceover) = people going to see a film (hopefully).