Production Blog: Finding Our Music

     Hello once again, today we started choosing and exploring our music options! For this process, I started out very confused and, honestly, totally lost. For my first step, I needed to figure out where to begin searching for the music. My group and I were quite unsure even about what kind of music we wanted to include. Our starting idea was that we wanted a playful yet eerie-sounding song to be playing in the background for the majority of the film. My plan was to have whatever song we chose to play when the record player, in the beginning, was shown, and then I would adjust the volume as needed according to dialogue scenes. I was also planning to add a few sound effects, so we would need to look for those as well. 

    I thought a good start would be to search for 'eerie children's music' on YouTube to just get a baseline of what I wanted to look for. A playlist called "Creepy Old Songs" showed up and I looked at a few songs in there. Some possible contenders were Mr Sandman, The Lollipop Song, and Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries.  These were pretty old songs so I thought they might fit the sound I was going for, but in the end, they just made me feel like I should be putting my whole film in black and white, so I skipped them. However, I kept Mr. Sandman in mind just in case, because I felt like it was one of the better options from that list.

    As I was looking around, my friend who I was with started to help me, and she started suggesting songs she heard on TikTok that were eerie. She reminded me of this one song that we eventually found was called Daisy Bell by Henry Dacre. It was trending on TikTok for a while and had a really eerie yet kidlike feel to it, almost like a nursery rhyme. I looked up different versions of the song and all of them were unfortunately too short to cover the whole time constraints of the project. Even so, I wrote it down and kept it in mind just in case we decide to use more than one song, in which case I would be able to fit Daisy Bell in.

    I then kept scrolling to find a YouTube playlist called "Creepy Backrooms playlist," which I was a bit skeptical about but decided to check it out anyway. It had a longer version of the Daisy Bells song, but it was extremely slowed and revered to the point of sounding fake. There were a few other songs in there but most were just instrumental or slowed versions of lullabies.

    The next song I took a deep look into was the song Tiptoe Through the Tulips by Tiny Tim in 1929. This song I thought had a lot of potential to be the main song for our film. It was playful, it was eerie, it was almost long enough, which could be fixed by performing slight editing tweaks. All of these aspects I thought were great and I really liked the song and so did my friend. I copied the link and sent it to my group to which they replied it was "too scary" and "too eerie." To this, I was a bit confused, since being eerie is a huge staple of the thriller genre. I added this song to my list of possible options because I really felt strongly about the use of this song. 

    The next song was one that Riley, Marissa, and Mackena found called Lorelei's Lullaby which is part of the CSGO Music Kit. I listened to it and it sounded like your stereotypical creepy music, so it had potential. The three of them were really adamant about using this song, but I still really felt strongly about Tiptoe Through the Tulips. To appease both parties, I suggested that when I started the editing process, I would find a way to fit both songs in so we get a variety of songs in our film and everyone is content. 

    After research, I found that Tiptoe Through the Tulips is in the U.S. public domain and both the CSGO Lullaby and the sound effects that I planned to use had the publisher in the YouTube video descriptions explicitly giving full permission for use. For example, the sound effects YouTube video said in the comments, "For all of you asking permission to use these in your videos, the answer is yes!"