For my first Mashup Assignment of the week, I chose to do the assignment called Movie Music Comparison – Can You Score?.  For this assignment, I was tasked with taking two musical scores from two different films and combining them in a meaningful way.  At first, I dabbled with a few original movie songs, but I ultimately decided to use two lyricless songs for my mashup.

The two scores that I chose to use were “The Dark Knight Theme” from the film The Dark Knight and “Of Their Own Accord” from the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  I know that a video game is not a movie, but the musical score used in the video game could have easily fit into a movie.  Also, many video games are essentially movies that are played, so I felt that using this song would not deviate from the assignment too far.  I included both of the original Youtube videos that I took the audio from.

Both of these musical scores are from the same composer, Hans Zimmer.  Zimmer is a musical legend, composing musical scores for movies such as The Lion King, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, and the recent film Interstellar.  As the two songs that I used  are from the same composer, they both feature a similar style and blend well together.

To create the mashup, I downloaded the audio files from Youtube using Savefrom.net.  With the clips downloaded, I imported them into Audacity.

Surprisingly,  the audio scores complimented each other quite well with little editing.  The only real editing that needed to be done was trimming the musical scores to the same length, as well as adjusting the volume of certain segments throughout both clips so that both could be heard simultaneously.

Separately, both musical scores tell a story of their own.  The Dark Knight Theme‘s rapid tempo gives off the feeling of urgency felt by the Batman to stop the Joker which is in turn felt by the viewer throughout the film.  In Of Their Own Accord, the feeling of hopelessness felt by the U.S. Marines in the video game is personified by the somber mood given off by musical score.  In the particular part of the video game where this song appears, the player and his allies arrive at Washington D.C. to see it has been ravaged by enemy bombings.  Together, a bit of each score’s mood spills into the other.  The desperation felt by the Marines could also have been felt by the Batman, while the Marines also feel the Batman’s sense of urgency with their task of preventing global thermonuclear war.

Here is my mashup:

This Mashup Assignment was worth: