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Behind the Creepy Screaming of the Prometheus Trailer

Joe Berkowitz interviews Paul Dinletir of audiomachine about how he writes music from film trailers and where that electronic scream on the Prometheus trailer came from.

The music used in trailers isn’t always organically drawn from the film. Often the composers who create it have nothing to do with the score of the film in question, but still manage to boil its essence down to a minute or so of audio. We spoke to Paul Dinletir of audiomachine, the company that made the music for the Prometheus trailers, about the indelible sounds from that film, and the ins and outs of making music for trailers in general.

The music is such a big part of the Prometheus trailer; what sort of music and sound references did the filmmakers give you?
The big cue that was used on Prometheus is called “Judge and Jury.” This track was created with the idea of the orchestra, not being used in the traditional “orchestral” sense, but as more of a sound-design element to support the prominent electronic elements in the track. I wish I could say we delivered just what they asked us to do for this spot, but “Judge and Jury” was an existing cue off our Deus Ex Machina release that they licensed. You’ll have to track down the savvy music supervisor or editor that picked this cue for the trailer, although it was definitely written for a futuristic sci-fi type movie trailer. On the teaser trailer, they also used our cue “Knights and Lords,” which is a big action-adventure type cue.

How does one get into creating music for trailers?
I grew up playing classical piano with aspirations of becoming a songwriter. I first became interested in film scoring when I took a class about writing music for film through UCLA Extension. Eventually, I started getting jobs creating custom score for trailers while I was also composing for cartoon shows (Samurai Jack, My Life As a Teenage Robot) and reality TV shows (Hell’s Kitchen, Paradise Hotel, The Swan). As you can imagine, the pace of writing for all of those different projects was pretty intense. Currently, all of my efforts are concentrated on creating trailer music for audiomachine.

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