The goal of this essay is to explain how the soundtrack for the Aeon Flux animation 'War' was developed. Furthermore, the ideas, influences, themes and production processes applied will be discussed in detail. Subsequently, a critical and objective evaluation of the effectiveness of the entire soundtrack will be presented. To begin with, the main idea of the assignment was to capture Foley effects and compose original music for Aeon Flux's "War" animation. Foley is commonly known as a process of recording various sounds and manually matching them with film motion (ref) (ref). This process is widely applied in film post-production because most of the time the separate sounds of character dialogues are lost during recording. In this particular assignment, most of the required Foley effects were captured and implemented. Even though Foley seems to be important, the actual music is more crucial in a film. With its help the image is able to convey moods and emotions (ref1) (ref2). This allows the viewer to feel part of the film and experience the plot in more depth. The influences for the soundtrack come from varied and contrasting artists. Both the Hollywood (cinematic) genre and that of contemporary electronic music inspired the project. The fusion of these two different musical worlds shaped the result of the soundtrack making it more unique and original. The ideas for the orchestral musical style came mainly from famous film scores such as John Williams' Jaws and John Powell's The Bourne Supremacy. Identical motifs of suspense and fear from Williams's Jaws were implemented in the final scene of "War" by Aeon Flux (ref) (ref). This worked effectively as the last scene of “War” required some sort of scary… paper medium… to make them stand out and not be masked by the composition. To make the orchestral instruments sound more natural, alterations in their dynamics were applied. For example, staccato string notes used different velocity levels to emphasize certain phrases. Additionally, techniques such as crescendo and diminuendo have been implemented in some places to add variation (Ref) (ref). Additional changes that occur throughout the soundtrack are tempo variations, which vary between 100 and 140 beats per minute. Additionally, different time signatures of 3/8 and 4/8 were applied in some scenes. This added more interest and originality rather than using the traditional 4/4 structure (ref?). It's also important to mention that all orchestral drum patterns were programmed by hand (no loops). As a result, a more precise rhythm adaptation to the overall picture was achieved.
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