How to write music for movie trailers

Com­pos­er Fred­er­ick Lloyd may not be wide­ly known by name, but if you’ve watched a movie trail­er over the past five years or so, chances are you’ve prob­a­bly heard his work. Under the alias Ursine Vulpine, Lloyd has carved an inter­est­ing niche for him­self, pro­vid­ing the musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment to teasers for Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters.

Lloyd’s career began dur­ing his film pro­duc­tion stud­ies at UCA. Musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tions with his peers soon fol­lowed, with him pro­vid­ing scores for a num­ber of shorts, includ­ing his own short, Pan­theon, which gar­nered suc­cess at film fes­ti­vals around the world.

Since then he has been in demand for his short-form work. Notable projects include his con­tri­bu­tions to the re-imag­in­ing of John Williams’ exist­ing scores for his work on the trail­ers for The Force Awak­ens and The Last Jedi, as well as the likes of Alien: Covenant, Mad Max: Fury Road and Hack­saw Ridge. We sat down with him recent­ly to dis­cuss his process.

“When it came to doing my grad­u­a­tion film, I was being co-man­aged at the time by a cou­ple of guys, one of whom is still my man­ag­er… They gave the score that I had done for Pan­theon to the com­pa­ny I work for in LA, Push­er Music, who are a trail­er music agency. Before I knew it, I had a track from my grad­u­a­tion film in a trail­er for Zero Dark Thir­ty. At that point I thought, ​‘Okay, maybe this is a career path worth explor­ing.’ So I start­ed doing more trail­er music and it just snow­balled from there.”

“I did a cov­er of ​‘When The Saints Go March­ing In’ for the Snow­den trail­er where I changed quite a large bulk of the track to fit with the tone they were going for. Orig­i­nal­ly it was a lot more orches­tral and hope­ful, but I decid­ed to go back and reshape the sec­ond half of the song to make it a lit­tle bit dirt­i­er, more syn­thet­ic and grit­ty to con­trast the first half. As a result it seemed to fit much bet­ter with the themes and sto­ry of Snowden.”

“That was a cov­er that I’d been want­i­ng to do for a very long time… I want­ed to tack­le it just out of respect for it. I love that song so much that I want­ed to do my own thing with it, to see where it could go. I know that that song has been cov­ered to death, but I want­ed to make it feel dif­fer­ent to the oth­er ver­sions that I’d heard. So that’s what I did for the My Cousin Rachel trailer.”

“I use a lot of sam­ple libraries and most trail­er com­posers, when they’re mock­ing stuff up, will use these sam­ple libraries. I do some live instru­men­ta­tion. I do some singing myself, I’ve got a lit­tle vio­lin that I do some screech­ing nois­es on, and I play gui­tar as well. But often I just don’t have time to sort out a live record­ing for a full orches­tra or a brass sec­tion or a choir. Sam­ple libraries today are just incred­i­ble. The sounds and the real­ism that you can get out of them is so impres­sive and I’ve always strived for real­ism. If any­thing sounds fake or it doesn’t quite sit right, that always both­ers me.”

“‘Wicked Game’ took me sev­er­al months to get right, just because I knew I need­ed to get it per­fect. But some­times I’ll get a brief through and it will be a case of, ​‘We need this for Fri­day,’ and it’s Tues­day. I’ll have up to a week to com­plete a piece of work, if I’m lucky. I find it’s not too hard to work with­in those dead­lines though. It pres­sures you into hav­ing to devel­op some­thing quick­ly and just go with it. There isn’t enough time to be sec­ond-guess­ing yourself.”

“For the most part, the edi­tor in charge of putting the trail­er togeth­er is respon­si­ble for giv­ing feed­back. It’s a back-and-forth process. Some­times they’ve got every­thing they need straight away, oth­er times they might request changes. There’s often a lot of edit­ing on their part as well, so some­times we don’t have to do any­thing and oth­er times we do.”

“One of the biggest chal­lenges is try­ing to do some­thing that feels dif­fer­ent and push­es the bound­aries of what makes an effec­tive trail­er track. I always find the ones that make the most inter­est­ing trail­ers are the ones that aren’t just a gener­ic, big hybrid orches­tral track.”

Ursine Vulpine’s debut album ​‘Respire’ is released on 13 July via ursine​vulpine​.com