FilmmakerIQ.com » Post-production

Behind the Creepy Screaming of the Prometheus Trailer

John P. Hess — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:51:59 +0000

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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Get Editing Quickly with Premiere CS6

John P. Hess — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:31:19 +0000

This lesson provides new editors with an overview of the editing process in Premiere Pro. A lot of this video applies to previous versions of Premiere as well.

What’s new in After Effects CS6 in under 6 minutes

John P. Hess — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:10:54 +0000

VFXBro runs down what’s new in the latest iteration of the popular compositing software from Adobe.

Build a Planetary Scene inside After Effects

John P. Hess — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:00:35 +0000

VinhSon Nguyen walks through some basic tips on creating a earth or space scene using CC Sphere and a texture map.

A Glimpse at the New Plural Eyes 3

John P. Hess — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:10:13 +0000

Dan Chung, the DSLR Newshooter talks to Bruce Sharpe of Singular software about the newly improved Plural Eyes – a plug in designed to quickly sync audio files and video files.

Real Camera Shake: Free After Effects Preset

Dennis — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:43:16 +0000

“Real Camera Shake,” by VFX BRO, is a preset unlike your traditional camera shake because it uses real world physics rather than a wiggle simulation in After Effects. Use this preset to add shake to your still shots.

Download Free!

Color Grading and finishing in Premiere Pro CS5.5

Dennis — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:42:35 +0000

This video tutorial, by Jarle Leirpoll, teaches how to do primary, secondary and some pretty advanced color correction in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. You’ll learn how to create masks for color correction inside of Premiere Pro, and to tweak parts of the image without affecting others.

Also covered is how to fix moiré, blown-out highlights, blue sky fix, sharpening, letterboxing, noise reduction, stabilizing and scaling/crop.

Click here to download the free preset collection “Jarle’s Grading Tools” so you can speed up your own color grading workflow.

Mr. Foley: A Man Stalked By A Personal Soundtrack Team

Dennis — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:25:52 +0000

Mr Foley is an award winning short film directed by Dublin directing duo Mike Ahern & Enda Loughman aka D.A.D.D.Y. It’s a darkly funny but nightmarish scenario, a man wakes up in hospital with a group of sound artists soundtracking his life.

Evil Dead 2 Trailer – Rotoscoped!

Dennis — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:23:22 +0000

The Trailer for Evil Dead 2 rotoscoped by “Pretend For Real.” Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. It’s an extremely tedious process that took these creators 3 years to complete.

6 Ways Directors Screw Sound Editors

John P. Hess — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:00:47 +0000

Christian Bell outlines some of the bad sound habits of directors and how it makes post sound that much harder…

1. Unclean Dialogue
My heart always sinks when I’m sat with a director, looking through rushes in the edit suite and I see something along the lines of the following:

Characters talking in front of traffic, running water, music, crowds and the list goes on.

You can just edit that stuff out right?

Umm. No.

But aren’t there filters? Ah yes. Filters. Sure, in some cases you may be able to clean it up a little but it still won’t sound good. Just a different ever so slightly lesser kind of terrible.

And don’t ever say, “We’ll just ADR it”. ADR, unless you have access to the right facilities or really know what you’re doing, should always be an absolute last resort. It’s not just about having the actor spout their lines in time with the picture. You need to get the right sound perspective, you need the right microphone and it needs to match the other elements that you’re not adr-ing. And who are you kidding? You’ll probably be too broke for that stuff anyway come postproduction.

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