THE HISTORY/ELEMENTS OF TRAILER MUSIC

Trailer music is the background music used for film previews, which is not always from the film's soundtrack.

Purpose of Trailer music The purpose of this music is to complement, support and combine these aspects together for the film trailer. Because the score for a movie is usually composed after the film is finished, a trailer will incorporate music from other sources. Sometimes music from other successful films or hit songs is used as a tie-in method.

What trailer music doTrailer music have a job to stop your heart, steal your breath and leave you gasping for more – and the chances are, you've barely given their work a second thought. The world of trailer music: an industry few people know exists, producing scores heard every day by millions.

Trailer housesThe art of scoring a trailer requires a certain style of thinking, and also an entirely different approach to composition. Trailer scores are authorized by production companies via "trailer houses", which produce the final edit. They typically last two minutes and are split into three parts: beginning, middle and end, usually all containing different pieces and styles of music. The goal is to produce a heavily briefed, tightly wound and taken care edited piece of work in which every second counts.

John BealA popular trailer composer

"People just assume that the music in the trailer is from the film," says the veteran TV and film composer John Beal.

HISTORY "That was the case a long time ago, although the music was taken from other films instead. Back when I started, only the occasional trailer was actually scored. The process has changed a lot since then."Beal was the first of his kind: a composer creating original scores for film trailers. "I realised the trailer was not being served as well as the picture was," he says. In 1979, he was given the chance to put that right, when he scored the trailer for Skatetown, USA, Patrick Swayze's debut. Since then, Beal has been the man behind the music for more than 2,000 trailers – scoring everything from The Matrix to Mean Girls. "After 30 years of doing this, the soundtrack in my head as I'm doing the groceries is a lot more dramatic than other people's," he says. "I live in a constant state of hyperbole."