St. Paul’s Catholic College – Thorn Lane

Contacting Tanner Howe

When working out what music we wanted for our trailer, we narrowed down what popular songs we knew as a group that would be linked to our trailers themes and issues. We had many songs in mind but after many group meetings we decided that we would use Imagine Dragons – Demons. When we heard the song by the artists themselves we decided maybe that it would be better to use a cover version of the song from a YouTube cover artist. From looking at various YouTube cover artists, we came around various artists some of the people we found included:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8sQEJx9FiEThis was one of the first covers we heard when looking for music for our trailer. From listening to this first we learnt very quickly that we wanted a male to sing the song to our trailer as girls voices stereotypically tend to be more innocent and sweet and would not give the haunting effect that we desired during our trailer. Also we felt this song like many others that we went on to hear had a very strong echo. When finding this song we also decided very quickly that this song was not authentic enough and did not have a haunting feel to the song for us to justify the use of it for our trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inYieXW9JA0We were very fond of this song when we found it in our early stages of music searching. Although we really did like the version of the song and how they made it their own, we felt that the song was too upbeat for what our trailer was displaying and the haunting effect was once again missing from their trailer. Another fault that we felt this cover had and why we couldn’t use it would be that during the song one of the band members said ‘1,2,3,4’ and this is a feature that we did not want in our trailer. The group itself was also quite far away from the microphones and the recorder themselves so at times could have been clearer and to the standard we needed the music to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YZ7b1mIVIc We really liked this cover of the song, however we felt that the way the song was recorded at times made the lyrics more difficult to hear than other covers we had heard. Similarly to this we felt that the song throughout had a strong echo and although we wanted the song to be haunting this was not the effect we wanted. Also we felt this song was quite similar to the original and we wanted something that although stuck to the roots of the song had their own twist on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dja2PfJx6kAlthough we found this cover interesting and thought it was a different interpretation of the song, we decided against this song. This was down to many reasons, one of which was we knew the song the drummer was drumming too

was the official demons song and we wanted something that was a bit more original although the drumming was a very clever way of interpreting the song. We also decided against this song cover as we felt the beat of the song was not know we wanted our trailer to be considered. During one of our group meetings we felt that we needed the song to be more haunting and this version of the song would overpower what we seen on screen.

Our trailer’s non-diegetic soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijlbAEJElPY The demons cover by Tanner Howe has become the song to our trailer. There are many reasons why we decided to pick this cover; we unanimously decided that we loved the entrance to the song that Tanner had done with the piano and we felt this would work well with what we wanted to be in the scene at this point. We also thought the way that the song had been covered didn’t make it song like a happy song and didn’t make it sound so sad that no one would want to watch our show. We also stated that the vocals within the song were ones we all liked and thought the recording of the song was very clear and made sure that the lyrics were heard over the music in the background.

After we decided on Tanner Howe’s cover version of the song we tried to contract him on different forms of social networking. However we never received a reply therefore if he ever did reply and was against us using the cover we had a back up option of using the ‘Heart & Heads’ version as we felt that we could make that song work as a second option and we could play around with the sound of the song and make it want what wanted.