The theater lights dim. The screen goes black. You have sat through all the eye candy paraphernalia which can be summed up in the statement "Please turn off your cell phones". Soon, the movie you came to see will start. But, for better or worse, there are still between three and six previews left to sit through. Possibly there will be a film coming out this summer that you will want to watch, so you view this part with a mixture of interest and impatience. The familiar words "THE FOLLOWING PREVIEW HAS BEEN..." set against the usual green background run their course. Once again the screen is black. You are presented with quick flashes of production company logos, and then black one last time. From this point there are a few possibilities of the direction the preview will take. I will use for example the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which came out last year when I started working on this, as my first example example.
The Epic!
Scenes quickly fade in and out, giving a sense of mysterious excitement, and the music adds that little touch of tension. You recognize actors from the first Chronicles of Narnia movie, and know right away what this preview will be about. Scenes switch to words and back again, giving the sense that something big is about to happen. The music builds as a wind starts to blow harder and harder, sweeping away the London train station and leaving the children once again in Narnia. A few lighthearted moments ensue, but very quickly the viewer is thrown into a world of wars and fighting. One in which the fate of an entire kingdom rests on what these children can do, and one in which the stakes are high. Scenes of fighting, of shouting, and of flying permeate the trailer, and the whole epic situation is shoved irrevocably down your throat by the monstrously loud-mixed music. Haunting, soaring, pounding, rushing, chasing, building, building, building, marching, then all of the sudden dropping, the music leaves the viewer sure that the world has just ended with the consummation of the preview. But wait, there is hope! May 2008 will bring a chance to once again enter that world in which overstatement rules. If you can hold on, you might just get the chance to spend eight dollars and once again find a world in which epic is an understatement, and which will be sure to give you goose-bumps by the sheer number of instruments confined to pounding out hits on a rhythm that has probably only been used uncountable times before. There is hope!
The Problem
The music used in the preview cited can be summed up in one word: "Generic". There are five different pieces used in the trailer, authored by the companies "Brand X Music", "Pfeifer Broz. Music", "Immediate Music", and "Groove Addicts". These companies are composers for hire, and this is the route very frequently taken in the underscore for trailers. Navigating to the Brand X Music website and then to their music library section, we find the music divided into the following categories: Action, Adventure, Beginnings, Odds & Ends, Comedy, Drama, Epic, Family, Horror, Pop, Rock, Suspense, Techno, and Urban. Generic music. A trailer production company will come here looking for music to go with their thriller preview, and get to listen to what the company can do when it comes to creating an ambience that exudes horror and suspense. If they like the atmosphere created, they contact the company, get financial situations arranged, and the company writes music to their specifications. Now I am sure that Brand X Music has some talented composers working for them, who really can create very nice pieces of music. However, I believe that the whole idea behind this company and many others is taking away from the art form that is film music.
Thus we have five separate and in no way confluent pieces of music, except for the fact that each piece is completely generic. The only elements present to make the trailer's underscore defined as music are rhythm, repetition, the use of instruments and vocals, and tonality. No over-arching harmonic idea. No musical meaning. No thematic development. The whole thing fits into the "ambience" category. But there can be no doubt that it creates atmosphere effectively, and to the larger part of the movie-going audience, the orchestral blasts will sound noble and fittingly epic. Thus I raise the question: Should music in trailers be music, or ambience? Should it lower itself to its audience? It this really all we should have when it comes to trailer music?
The Classic
Another very interesting trailer example is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull which was around about the same time. Before I go on, I must explain that I am unashamedly a John Williams fan. That said, let us take a look at the trailer. It begins playing the music written by Brian Tyler for Children of the Dune backing the scenes of landscape and bits and pieces of the old trilogy, without ever showing the face of Indiana Jones himself. The music is the typical generic output, and would at first lead the viewer to believe that it is just another summer flick in which stakes are unbelievably high, and everything is pushed to the limits. Then, as the scene shows the classic Jones hat lying on the ground, and someone in brown pants coming to pick it up, the music begins to play the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the most widely recognized piece of music from the trilogy. The beginning motif is looped twice, and then the theme itself comes in full blast once the action begins. All the sudden the audience has switched from a "Just another end of the world epic film" mindset to an "Another Indiana Jones movie!" mind-set. John Williams, composer for Indiana Jones (as well as Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, E. T., Hook, Schindler's List, the first two Jurassic Park movies, the first three Harry Potter movies as well as countless others) made such a recognizable and well loved underscore for the original trilogy that the impact of that old analogue recording on this new trailers is enormous. I do not know if the trailer production team did the contrasting types of music for this purpose or not, but it serves as an excellent example of the over-used and the extraordinary.
So what?
But few to basically no movies have the advantage of a returning John Williams theme, not to mention one of his most loved themes, being used in their film. What then can be done to rise above the mediocrity out of which trailer music is usually made? Once again, I must cite a John Williams example. For the original trailer to Hook, Williams composed a complete piece of music, with no other intended use than the trailer. 1:30 minutes in length, it is all one piece. It has themes from the movie, and even thematic development. Williams was starting a whole new film, and immediately introducing the musical style, themes and orchestrations that would be used in the movie. There is musical meaning, because a production team did not just copy-paste unrelated generic music onto images. Williams, obviously a musical genius, wrote what might be considered almost an overture for the film, and it was used in the trailer. This trailer is now rare, and quite hard to find in any sort of quality, but the piece written for it has survived on the score album for the movie, and makes a really wonderful stand-alone piece of music.
It has frequently been observed that the business of making trailers has really become an art in and of itself. Perhaps, then, it should be treated as such, and not as scenes and music thrown randomly together to create nothing more than adrenaline. If composers and trailer production teams alike could both stop stooping to the general public's idea of music and begin putting real meaning and depth into their trailer scores, it would make them much more worth watching. Overtures serve as a sort of introduction to larger works, and function very nicely as stand-alone pieces. These would be perfect requirements for trailer music, and the whole trailer production "art" could be turned into something worthy of the term.
-Colin Thomson
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