EARNEST - Original music

One member of our team, Cliona, has a friend, Stingy Eyes, who agreed to do a bespoke commission of the first fifty seconds of "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" by Elton John and Kiki Dee.

We decided we wanted an upbeat, happy, pop song to give the short film the right feel, and this was a popular choice among the group.
We'll play this music during the opening shots while there is no dialogue and the credits roll, showing names of the actors, characters, the members of our team, a short sentence explaining that our story is based off the Wilde classic, and a credit to Stingy Eyes for covering the song for us.


We considered some other music for the opening; all upbeat, well known pop songs, and it was hard to pick between them, but we all decided that Elton John was the way to go. Here are some of the other songs we considered earlier, and why we decided against them.

This song is very upbeat and poppy, with a fun message and a lively beat. I thought it might work for our's as it's a light hearted song of a guy trying to convince a girl to do nothing more than "Hang out". It's innocent and fun, but we decided it would probably work better if our characters were younger, and more innocent themselves. It is very fast paced and this was another reason we decided against this song - our own story, or at least the opening two minutes, isn't too quickly paced, and the song might seem out of place.

Less about romance, and more about kids growing up, this was a slightly unorthodox suggestion compared to the others, but it does have ground to stand on. It's a 'coming of age' song about the stages of life and the changes we go through, from kids to adults. Our story, seeing as the characters we created aren't as old as the original ones, does have a theme of growing up, and I feel that if we were to expand our two minute story into a full movie, growing up would be a reoccurring motif. However, our own movie will be two minutes alone, and this song doesn't have enough romance int it to be relevant to what we're doing.

A classic, everybody knows this song, which is one of the reasons we considered using it. A good way to get an audience involved quickly is to use a song that everybody can bob their heads to. This song also threads in very nicely with some of the themes in our story: both the girls are of higher standing than the boys, who are reasonably well enough to begin with. However, our short movie is very modern, and the only reasons we might use an older song are a) an audience is more likely to know it and b) we're basing our story off one already written. This song just isn't modern enough for us to use in our piece.

 

A popular song about creating personas to win the hearts of boys over, this song would've worked better if we went with our idea of playing on the homosexual undertones of the Wilde classic, but even when we decided against that train of thought, this song was still a strong contender. It's upbeat without being too fast, good lyrics, a lot of fun to listen to, and popular enough so that people would recognise even an acoustic male cover. We decided to not use this song however, because it has a sly, borderline malicious at times, tone, and the intent of hurting the speaker's 'conquests', which doesn't work with our characters.

 

Light hearted and catchy, I like this song a lot, and I felt like it would work well for our story on a subtextual level: We're basing our story off a 'classic', and a reoccurring motif in the original play is that the the characters are repeatedly held back by old, 'classic' traditions. It'd be ironic, particularly concerning the character of Chelsea, who repeatedly dismisses the notion of being a 'classic' woman, more interested in being wild and wicked. In the end, we didn't choose this song, not because of it's own faults, but because we felt Don't Go Breaking My Heart just fit better.

This song really plays on the theme of class in the story, and how both of the girls are of a higher standard than the boys, particularly Gemma and Jay.  It has a bit of a slow start for a few seconds, which is one of the reasons we didn't go with it in the end, but is manages to convey the concept of 'leagues' very light heartedly. It's a nice song, uncertain whilst still being fun to listen to. It's because of the uncertainty we didn't use it actually - neither of the boys either question that they deserve to be with their respective girls., only how to get their. Their confidence borders on arrogance at times, rich boys who have to work for something for once, and the humility of self doubt doesn't feature in our story. 

We considered and then dismissed this song for similar reasons as the song above; a song about a boy looking at a girl out of his league and wondering how they ended up together, and if they could stay this way. It's a lot poppier than the other song above, and we considered it for longer because of that. This song is a lot of fun, and very catchy, but in the end, it features too heavily around doubt, and that is not a problem our boys have.