Inside Our Process: How Tonal Chaos Scores a Motion Picture Trailer
Scoring a motion picture trailer at Tonal Chaos starts the moment a brief lands in our inbox and a Vimeo link drops with twelve seconds of locked picture and ninety more seconds of "this part will probably change." The cue we ship a week later has to survive three rounds of edits, four supervisor opinions, and the marketing department's instinct to ask for "more, but less." This post walks through how we actually do it.
We work on trailers for theatrical studio releases, network spots, brand campaigns, and game launches. The process below is the one we run on every cinematic-tier brief, the kind that needs to feel like a movie even when the picture is still moving.
Reading the picture before writing a note
The first hour of any trailer score at our studio is just watching. No DAW open, no template loaded. We're looking for the three or four moments the cue has to land. The opening texture. The first hit. The drop into silence before the title. The final stab.
Almost every trailer brief comes with a temp track. The temp is information, not a target. What it tells us is the tempo the editor is locked into, the kind of risers they expect, the rhythm of the cut. What it doesn't tell us is what the marketing team actually wants. They almost always want something the temp implies but doesn't quite deliver. Reading that gap is the real skill.
The room and the rig
We compose in Digital Performer because the way it handles Chunks lets us sketch three or four cue variations inside one session without losing track of which version is which. The orchestral side runs on Spitfire and Orchestral Tools libraries. The hybrid and trailer-specific side runs on Heavyocity, Output, and a long shelf of custom-processed pulse engines, hits, and risers we've built up over years of motion picture advertising work.
Our sound design rig sits on the same desk. That's intentional. The "music" decisions in a modern trailer are almost always sound design decisions about texture and impact, and trying to separate the two would slow us down by half. A Soundtoys chain printing in parallel with a Spitfire string ostinato is one of the most common moves in our writing template. Neither would land on its own. Together they sound like the picture is about to break.
Building the cue
We start with the second hit. Not the opening, not the drop, not the resolve. The second hit, which is usually around the thirty-five second mark in a ninety-second trailer, is where the cue has to commit to its identity. If we can get that one moment to feel inevitable, the rest of the trailer writes itself around it.
From there we work outward. The opening texture pulls back enough to make the second hit feel earned. The build leans forward. The drop and the title moment land. The final stab leaves the audience wanting one more beat. If we've got the second hit right, almost every decision after that is a yes-or-no, not a what-should-we-do.
We mix as we write, because the cue gets evaluated in a 25-second cutdown before it ever gets evaluated in the master length. Anything that doesn't survive being heard on agency laptop speakers through a Zoom call doesn't ship.
Delivery
Once a cue is locked we render full mix, alternate length versions, the music bed, sound design only, and stems split out by section. We package the whole delivery and send it through DropCue. The supervisor gets a branded share link with timestamps, comments, and per-recipient analytics, so we know who actually opened the link, who played each version, and which alt they ended up using. That data shapes the next pitch, because we know what landed.
We also keep selected cues in our Tonal Chaos Trailers library when the rights situation allows. Some of our best one-off custom work ends up there as the foundation for new pieces, which means a brief that lands on a Tuesday can sometimes draw from work we did three years ago for a completely different campaign.
Why no two cues sound the same
The honest answer is the picture, the temp, the supervisor, and the brand all push the cue in different directions, and the job of the studio is to find the unique sonic point of view that satisfies all four. Every brief we score at Tonal Chaos is its own short film. The minute we start writing to a formula is the minute the work stops being worth licensing.
If you're cutting a trailer, a brand spot, or a network promo and want to talk about scoring it, write us at music@tonalchaos.com. We read every brief that comes in and respond within a day.