"Music in Film" is probably my favourite Senior Music Unit. In particular, the composition dimension seems to produce some fantastic student work. This year, for my year 10 Music class, I provided the students a choice of three film segments they could compose a soundtrack for (A spooky animation, A human Flight clip and a Futuristic Nike animation).
Once students had spent a great deal of time analysing the codes and conventions of different film genres, they were able to experiment effectively in creating their own original compositions utilising the compositional devices they had studied in class.
Take a look at these three different student created soundtracks for the same, cute animation I found:
Original Clip:
Student Clip 3:
The following clip was also very popular and I found it on Vimeo. In addition to a "spooky/horror" theme option above, I wanted the students to have the option of exploring "flight" themes. All of the compositions were made using Garage Band and some students opted to record themselves on other instruments and embed it into the soundtrack.
Human Flight Student 1:
And finally, a highly popular choice was this Nike Animation found on Youtube:
