Ever noticed that most movie trailers seem very similar and follow the same kind of cadence or have the same kind of themes? Me too, so in this blog, in preparation for mixing my own movie trailer, I am going to pick apart the main trailer for the movie Backcountry and see how they peak and keep the audience's attention. Before I get too far into it I'll tell you a little about my upcoming project. I have to recreate the trailer for the movie Arctic (as shown below) including Foley, dialogue and music. The Music, dialogue and some foley effects have been given to me already but I have to record the rest of the foley with a team then mix the entire thing together. So to be better prepared for that I want to figure out how trailers are put together on a basic level then go into more depth and look at the sonic qualities and what they actually achieve. Here is the official trailer I have to resound myself.
So as you can tell there is a lot in this trailer that will be interesting to tackle such as some very out there foley effects and also the subtle things like balancing dialogue to music and everything in between.
The trailer I will study is a little darker and a bit more Hollywood but I feel it contains the same kind of themes, battling against nature, raised tensions and so on. Have a watch and you can see there are some similarities between the two.
The main thing I want to explore in this trailer is how the audio works sonically to create a feeling of suspense and fear. To fully understand that I feel I need to look deeper into how sound actually scares or creates stress in an audience.
The Science behind scaring!
When you think of horror sound what do you immediately think of? The Jaws theme with it never ending rise of cacophony, some ch-ch-ch-cha-cha-cha for Friday the 13th? Why do these sounds scare or upset us? and How can we replicate these feelings with out own work? The answer comes from the most unlikely person Dan Blumstein and expert on... Marmots?
In this TED Talk Mr Blumstein talks about the research he's done into animal's cries and calls and how they change with stress. He found that the more urgent a call is the more the amplitude, frequency and non linear noise is introduced. This is due to the animal making the call being so distressed that the sound it makes 'blows out' it's vocal chords and creates extra noise similar to distortion, similar to if someones screams as loud as they can. So using these effects in sound design preys almost literally on our most animalistic instincts. The trailer I picked uses these effects perfectly ,an example of this within the trailer I am researching is at 1:14, a subtle crescendo started in the background, it starts at a lower amplitude, lower frequency and contains non linear noise. It rises and rises until it's the most dominant sound in the mix then stops suddenly. This uses all three of techniques Blumstein mentioned, Higher amplitude, frequency and nonlinear noise or distortion. Now that we understand how sound can be scary lets dive into this trailer and fully examine the sonic choices used to create tension starting with the music.
Music:
Music is the most important part of setting the pace of a trailer. The rising and falling of tension and use of many different and often subtle musical techniques in this trailer are the building blocks for making a thriller trailer. I'm going to start with the more generalized techniques and then move onto the more subtle additions to the score. The two most common techniques used in this trailer are crescendos and hits. These two techniques go hand in hand working together to set both pace and tension within thriller trailers. A crescendo as I mentioned before is a rising piece of music usually strings or some kind of unnerving synth that builds up and up until it stops suddenly. That's where a hit comes in, a hit is usually some form of percussion that blasts in to finish the tension build. These two techniques used together such as moments in the trailer at 0:30, 1:14 and 1:38 are all perfect examples of a rising frequency, amplitude, non linear noise which we have established is proven scientifically to scare your audience. These are the two biggest and most obvious methods of setting tension, literally setting up the audience and knocking them down but there are subtle works at play here as well. Some of these techniques involve noise, more specifically droning samples that fill in the gaps of frequencies usually low and high frequencies leaving the dialogue free around 4khz. Examples of these are in the very start of the trailer, it's introduced with a low rumble below 600hz and a higher drone around 16khz to fill in the spectral space and hit the ground running. What else is interesting is the amount of low frequency used in these drones, not adding to the real music but setting a low undertone that sits under the mix always reverberating through you. In 5.1 or any kind of sound system with a subwoofer, this would be sent straight through the sub which adds a lot to the overall tension of the trailer. Having this low sinister drone is another great example of how to set your audience's unease during the trailer.
As you can see from the screenshot above the higher pitched drone is really quite higher than everything else separating it completely from the rest of the sounds in the mix. It's in its own spectral space and isn't drowned out by dialogue or the low frequency drones, which in it's own way makes you feel uneasy. It'd be like if you were playing a song and everything was sitting in this range then a random note is played totally separate from anything else. It's unsettling and confusing and does a great job of allowing you to focus on the dialogue but still grab you and make you feel those things.
This is the real key for the score and the added noise during the trailer, you never want to step on the dialogue's toes but you also need to set the pacing and build the tension through use of drones, crescendo's and hits. Is the music's job is to set up the feel and pace then the dialogue's job is to start telling the story.
Dialogue:
For the dialogue I want to study the overall placement in the mix, priority and effects they used in the Backcountry trailer. As I said in the previous section the Dialogue's role in a trailer is to tell the story and invest the audience in whats happening on the screen. The dialogue is very important and so when looking at this trailer you can tell that a lot of effort was put into making sure what was being said wasn't being drowned out by everything else. Also as I mentioned previously the dialogue has been given it's own space to play with around the 250hz and 4khz which is a very important range for dialogue (see my other blogs about dialogue editing for reference). The screenshot below was taken during the dialogue at 0:18. The red section highlighted is the most important frequencies for dialogue. You can see in the green circle those two spikes which are making up that ever presence low rumble I was talking about in the music section and the yellow circle is used for the rest of the music in the scene. Obviously There are elements of the music that exist within the bandwidth of the dialogue but those elements can never be overemphasized otherwise you could be at risk of interrupting what's being spoken.
In terms of volume the dialogue isn't necessarily the loudest thing playing at any one time but due to its location in the middle it's never drowned out by the score or sound effects. Having important dialogue in the center speaker is a very common practice and is usually solely reserved for dialogue and key SFX used in film. An example is at 1:07, the dialogue is almost the same volume as the music at the time but due to it's direction and the placement of the music it isn't drowned out by the music's amplitude.
The effects for the dialogue are typical in most trailers, using good amounts of panning, reverb as well as subtle uses of volume automation. An great example of this is 0:39 when they go skinny dipping (...yeah I know...) the "whooo" and "Come on" placed further away using volume and low pass filters to add the illusion of distance. This is a very common technique for dialogue editing in film and games for that matter and it's one I intend to use for my product as well. All in all the dialogue in the trailer is great, there is a small hiccup around 0:42 that I assume is just because I'm using headphones while it's designed for surround sound but its a very muffled "hello" that just doesn't really fit the scene. The rest of that section with the 'tour guide' is slightly muddled as well but seeing as there is no lip syncing needed they probably put in other random voice clips that would make more sense in the scene they are from. I digress, the use on space, volume and filters are all great techniques for film editing and I'll get plenty of practice with my own trailer project.
Foley:
The foley in the Backcountry trailer is quite sparse and far in between but in a way that works quite well for what it's trying to achieve. Obviously you can't have every single foley noise you want for a trailer otherwise it would distract from a lot of the more important elements like dialogue and music. What is included in the trailer, footsteps, splashes, bear sound, doors opening ect are all mixed in pretty low when dialogue is around which works in their favour. This aside what interested me was what some of their foley was replaced by, for example at 0:45 when the 'tour guide' slams the fish down at the camp instead of a wet smack it was replaced by a music hit. I feel this helped the screen transition and added to the tension rather than just having a sodden thump worked well. It's good to learnt from Hollywood trailers like this because sometimes I get so caught up in adding the right SFX to everything and trying to add realism that sometimes you don't need the foley you can use something else in your sound design toolbelt. I did also notice a few extra sound effects they used to add to the tension rather than add realism like at 1:28 during the epic thriller montage they added a classic knife "shwing" when its on screen and then a scream from the female lead. Using these kinds of extras could be fun to work with but then again I think my trailer is more focused on serious survival rather than a mix of horror with thriller like this movie. There is a bunch to learn from the foley in this trailer more so the placement and lessons in when to use foley and when not to because that is always certainly a choice.
Conclusion
All in all this trailer had a lot to offer in terms of education for mixing my own trailer. I will definitely incorporate my own mix of crescendos and hits to assist the scene transitions and also knowing when to focus on certain elements throughout the trailer. I also have a much better understanding on what sounds actually frighten people and how best to ride that line so I'm not distracting people from the plot to try and scare them senseless. I'm really looking forward to mixing my trailer and be sure to check back in because there will most likely going to be a separate blog to this one on how I went and the end result. As always thanks for reading and don't be afraid to leave any feedback for me too.
References
Bleecker Street (2019). ARCTIC | Official Trailer. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5aD9ppoQIo [Accessed 15 Jun. 2019].
Blumstein, D., Bryant, G. and Kaye, P. (2012). The sound of arousal in music is context-dependent. Biology Letters, [online] 8(5), pp.744-747. Available at: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsbl.2012.0374?rss=1.
Haggin, P. (2012). Why Is Scary Music Scary? Here’s the Science | TIME.com. [online] TIME.com. Available at: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/19/why-is-scary-music-scary-heres-the-science/ [Accessed 15 Jun. 2019].
IFC Films (2015). Backcountry - Official Trailer I HD I IFC Midnight. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46uwmzTf5nA [Accessed 15 Jun. 2019].
Themusicjar.com. (2017). How To Keep Your Audience In Suspense Using Music. [online] Available at: http://www.themusicjar.com/blog-article/how-to-keep-your-audience-in-suspense-using-music/ [Accessed 15 Jun. 2019].
Amsen, E. (2017). What makes scary music scary?. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@easternblot/what-makes-scary-music-scary-125751198aa7 [Accessed 15 Jun. 2019].
TEDx Talks (2012). The Sound of Fear: Dan Blumstein at TEDxUCLA. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQQmFocLDng [Accessed 15 Jun. 2019].
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