OUAN505 - Sourcing Music

Music has been the topic of continual discussion throughout the course of the brief and the original idea was to have a friend of Gavin's create some music to accompany our animated documentary and ultimately have a piece of bespoke music that works well with the visuals we created. However, as the project neared the deadline, Callum and I thought it would be good to prepare for the scenario that the music wasn't able to be completed in time and source some royalty free music just in case we had to resort to that. We were quite fond of the music used in the 'in a nutshell sereies' by one of our main references for the project: Kurzgesagt. The music in the series is always apparent to the audience but is complimentary to the visuals and isn't intrusive on any of the other sounds used or the voiceover narration. We emailed the author of the music to enquire if it was open to relicensing or if we could use it for our project. However, due to the agreement between the author of the music and Kurzgesagt the music is not available to be owned by anyone else. We were told however, that they have a range of other music that is available to be used and they said they are always open to helping students and encourage personal projects. They gave us a playlist of licenseable music that we would be able to use for our project and there is a whole range of tracks that would suit our project really well, I think we need to have a listen to the tracks in combination with the visuals and narration once everything is sequenced together so that we can decide what looks to be the best suited music for our project.

On 3rd May, about a week before the deadline, Gavin's friend told him that he won't be able to finish the music in good time. There was still a lot of time to source music if we needed it and it's good that he informed us of this with around a week to go. Due to this we will be using one of the tracks off the playlist by 'Epic Mountain Music' for the main background track in our animated documentary. Epic Mountain have a 'direct music licensing' playlist in which they are happy for people to use for projects such as this one as long as they are non profit or purposes such as ours, educational. I will make sure to include the track we used in the credits so that we aren't using it without making sure they are credited for their music. After listening through the tracks on the playlist my favourites for the project are:

• Zero Gravity
• Space Travel
• Circular
• Rising Sky
• Discover The Light
• Makalu
• Behind The Mirror
• Into The Wild

These songs have a subtlety to them through the use of strings that means they won't be at all intrusive on the narration, and can be played at any volume of varying level throughout the documentary without any real problem. Furthermore they all sound like quite serious tracks, some of the tracks I listened to on the playlist sounded a little more 'fun' and less formal than I would have liked but the few I have chosen to look at further fit the animation theme quite well I think. They also have a sense of drama in them that may help to highlight the narration and give the whole animation some 'umph'. The next step from here will be in post-production where I play the tracks over the finished animation to see which fits best and what effect the visuals and the music have in relation to one another, and that is when I shall pick a final track for the animation.