Music

Music has been a hard thing to find for the project this year, the rules are that we are only allowed to use copyright free music. After emailing OCR to find out if we could use a cover of a song from Youtube, as long as we had the permission of the artist, we sent emails to a number of artists asking if we could use their songs. Sadly after much trying we gave up as they did not respond to any contact we made to them.
This meant we then had to search for original, copyright free music. We decided that we would need a few tracks throughout the film, as music fades in and out and different points. Our teacher did provide us with a collection of CD's to look through which had music for all kinds of genres. From this we managed to find a few acoustic instrumental pieces that we liked. We have used these throughout the film, as it fits well with the travelling shots that are used to show the distance the character is going.
However we felt that we still needed another track to go over the final scene, as Luke is killed and then as it cuts back to Nicole back at home finding out the news. As this is the main part of the film we wanted music that fitted well with what was going on. The piece had to be quite emotional and we were wanting a song rather than instrumental because this can be less repetitive or boring.

As we searched for music, Andrew found a site called Jamendo, this site contains collections of songs and artists all offering their music for free, and it is all royalty free.
After searching the site, we found an artist that sounded a lot more professional than the others. Josh Woodward is a very popular artist on the website and he has a collection of albums offering over 100 songs. He is an American acoustic rock musician from Ohio, and after listening to a couple of his songs it was clear that we wanted to use his music as he is better than a lot of the professional musicians who we pay to listen to.
We listened to all his albums and made a short list of tracks we wanted to use, in the end we narrowed it down to two. One that we really liked but didn't use in the end is called 'Border Blaster', this is a slow and sad song that fit well with the scene, however we didn't use it as it didn't match the cuts of the film as well as the other song did. The link to the song is below:

Border Blaster.

The song we did use is called 'Private Hurricane', the song starts slowly and gradually comes in, this was good to fade in the background as the scene goes on and Luke goes to help the man with the broken down car only to find out he has been set up. We faded the start of the song together with the ending, as the end of the song the music gets much louder as an electric guitar solo comes in. We matched this up with the film as it cuts back to Nicole, the song lyrics are quite sad as well for example the line, 'Did you believe what I said, that I'm never going to see you again.' The song matches the film great, Josh Woodward has a good emotional voice, and the power of the guitar solo kicking in is very powerful and we are hoping that this will impact on the audience. When we get feedback from the audience we will be able to find out if the scene has turned out as emotional as we have always wanted it to be.
The link for the song is below:

Private Hurricane