Music in Movie Trailers

When Nabeel showed us the clip of The Shining which was edited to look/sound like a family film instead of a horror one, I began to think about the use of music in trailers. As many of us have discussed here, a film's soundtrack often just seems like "background music" but in actual fact, if done right, not only complements (and sometimes even improves) the storyline, but also has a great impact on how the film is interpreted.

That being said, I feel that as important as it is to pick the right tracks for a film's soundtrack or to pick the right composer that will further enhance a film with a fitting score, it is even MORE important to pick the right songs/score for the film's trailer. I know that there are a lot of people who do not pay attention to trailers or are not easily swayed by them, but there are also a significant number of others (admittedly I'm in this category) that get easily influenced by them instead.

Whether it is consciously or unconsciously, the power of the trailer does exist. If a trailer is bad, it is most likely that you will equate this to the movie being equally as bad. Of course, the montage of shots selected to represent the film and undoubtedly to tease the audience coupled with very clever editing definitely predominantly determines how good a trailer is. However, another dimension to this is definitely the music that is chosen to accompany these series of images.

Working at the movies means I get to watch countless of trailers all the time. Sadly I have a very shocking memory and so most of them just fleet through my mind. However, there was one trailer that has stuck in my mind up to this day. It is definitely one of my favorites and in my humble opinion, one of the best and most cleverly constructed trailers out there.

The trailer I'm referring to is the teaser for Red Eye. The clip is 1 minute and 46 seconds long but what makes it unique is the fact that you only find out what the film is really about in the last 27 seconds. For that first minute and 19 seconds, the trailer is set up to look like a romantic chick flick-type comedy. The cleverly selected scenes from the film is perfectly juxtaposed with the music; it successfully manages to give the audience a false sense of knowledge about what this film is about.

The point where the audience are finally clued in to what the actual premise of the film is, the mood/feel of the trailer does a total 360 - it's brilliant. At the end of it - and this, in my opinion, is a mark of a good trailer - it left you wanting more and thus, most likely encouraging you to want to watch the film when it releases.

Anyway here's the trailer:



And of course, thanks to technology and YouTube, you can find many different versions of this trailer. I came across two which I thought were really interesting as they each gave the film a different "feel" to it. The first one, like that The Shining clip that Nabeel showed in class, totally changed the film's genre by painting it out to look like a romance film. The second one on the other hand, was not ambiguous at all but marketed the film as a straight suspense/thriller film.





It is very interesting to compare these two "fan"-made videos vs the original teaser trailer. The images used in the two were pretty much the same as the ones used in the original but it's incredible how just changing the music - and of course some of the editing too - can change the way you would think about the film and it's story.

As I said - power of the trailer, folks. And even more importantly, the power of music on screen ;)