Guest blogger Julie Hwang is the Interim Executive Director of the Asian Film Festival of Dallas.

Attendees to this year’s Asian Film Festival of Dallas, as well as visitors to our Web site, will see this year’s film festival trailer (above), featuring scenes from a few of the films in our program and set to the new AFFD theme music.

While film is, perhaps, most often thought of as a visual medium, most would say that music contributes greatly to film. When putting together a trailer using scenes, all without dialogue, from multiple films, music helps bring everything together.

This year, I’ll admit, our ambitions for music weren’t that high. We were hoping that maybe a local band would let us use one of their songs, or perhaps find a composer willing to whip up something electronically.

Instead, we were lucky enough to work with talented local composer/musician Douglas Edward, who wanted to give us a larger sonic landscape. Douglas composed the music, and for the tracking, he played about 10 layers of violins, six layers of viola and two layers of cello each. He also provided the violin solos  and sang about 10 choir parts.

In addition, Patrick Herring a graduate percussion student at SMU, performed several layers of concert toms, two layers of dumbeck (a medium sized ethnic instrument), two caxixi (ethnic shakers), a standard shaker, six triangles and suspended cymbals, all of which were recorded at Douglas’ apartment.

Local singer Julie Pham added her lovely voice. Douglas then finished the mixing, providing a few extra rhythmic claps and adding in several other instruments and tracks from his Yamaha keyboard and from samples.

Take a listen and see if you can pick all the parts out. Bonus points to listeners who can say why the notes of the theme are especially fitting for the Asian Film Festival of Dallas.