Sound (Part 1)

I'm doing a fair few of these posts in parts but who knows I may end up merging them together at the end of this project.

There was an issue I had on my AS Production which was that all the audio had to be taken out, even the dialogue, because of continuity with the background noises as we were filming. The same thing has happened for this project but all that means is that the sound has to be all artificial. Its not so much of a problem in this one because there isn't any dialogue to worry about but because of that, the sounds and how much of an effect they make is really important.

To start with the openings I decided to go for a fairly cliched but effective sound of howling wind to suggest a feeling of isolation and I think that really fitted with where the shot was taken. For the first few cuts I try to make it seem a little bit like different security cameras from different angles were watching the character in the car, zooming in on every cut. I threw in a short electrical buzz on each cut to really give that effect and I think it worked. After the first few shots we come to a shot which slowly zooms in on Corban in the car and as its zooming Corban suddenly jolts up from his ("sleep/blackout/unconsciousness", the audience will decide this) the camera stops as soon as Corban awakes so I needed a sound that would gradually build up and stop, almost like that sound effect used in war films when the character of importance is in the war scene and all the sounds are muffled out until eventually the character comes back down to earth and the sound has made its crescendo and just stopped and his hearing is back to normal. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the exact sound that I wanted but instead I've used the sound of a plane flying over head which, luckily, cut at the right time doesn't sound like a plane at all and its been able to give the effect I've wanted.

Main Task: Sound

Sound was a big aspect in our main task because not only did we need to find the right soundtrack that wasnt copyrighted and that fitted the mood we also needed to put all the sound that was taken out back in with sound effects and dub overs.

When filming the pub shoot we noticed a problem while we were filming; there was music playing in the background. The problem this meant for us was that if we were to keep the sound in the shoot there would be continuity errors. There would be one shot showing Hunt walking through a room and the music in both those shots would have been different, even though as far as the plot was concerned Hunt would have only been 2 seconds walking into the room. When editing the pub shoot we decided to take all the audio out and put in our own. All the sounds you can hear in the pub scene were edited in: the traffic in the opening shot, the background pub noises e.g background chatter, clinking of cutlery, footsteps, the door opening and closing we had to do all the sound. Henry even spent 5 to 10 minutes putting footsteps in and syncing them to the footage which was impressive. It turned out really well we thought in the end, and when people watched the edit after they didnt take notice of the sound, which is good because it meant we did it right. If it was wrong they would have noticed, so we were happy.

There was a great website called SoundJay.com which i used for finding free, good sounding and not copyrighted sound effects. I used this to find the door sounds, traffic sound, background chat sounds and footstep sounds.

There were also small scenes of dialogue which we had to dub over. To do this we simply recorded ourselves talking into the mic on the mac laptops, took the finished clip over to Final Cut and deleted the video but kept the audio. Then it was just a question of syncing it right with the footage. We borrowed Corban again when eiditing the film and made him say his line again and we did the same with Rob and myself. Henry took it apon himself to place the dubs in and sync them right and he did a good job we thought.