Behind the Scenes- Sound

Sounds

As you can see in the image to the left, we used various techniques in order to make our sound effects stand out to the audience. In the clip on the top left, we had muted it. This was in order to make sure our sound effect did not have background noises such as creaking floors or talking from where the characters were given directions. This ensures that our thriller sounded professional. The next tool we used was something that fades the music out, so that it does not come to a harsh stop. This was useful when overlapping clips, as this soft and subtle continuation from one sound to another ensures that it all works together well and flows so that it comes across professional.

The second tool we used was overlapping sound clips and changing the volume levels. When overlapping sound clips, we had to ensure that they mixed well together so that it didn't sound like two completely different sound tracks. As you can see, we merged the sounds in order to achieve this. Another use of sound that we incorporated was our use of volumes. Some clips were louder than others which caused a dramatic effect for the audience and aided in the building of suspense and tension.

Music

When choosing music, we knew that we had to avoid copyrighted sound effects and songs. To do this, we used a software platform called 'YouTube'. On this, we searched for 'Royalty Free Music' and 'Copyright Free Music', this meant that we were able to use sounds that would not get our thriller removed off of social media. This was important to us as we wanted to appeal to a mass audience, and this would not happen if we used existing sound effects and songs by other people, as it would be taken down. Once we found the clips that we wanted to incorporate, we used the software platform called 'YouTube Converter'. This enabled us to download the YouTube sounds into iTunes, which we could then put straight onto iMovie when editing the thriller. Other sound effects that we used were on iMovie itself, and we mainly employed these to replicate loud bangs in times of suspense. 

Our thriller sound track was very similar to that of The Sixth Sense, as we felt that this movie was very effective with building suspense (as seen in my previous blog plost of 3 key moments of suspense). They incorporated high pitch sounds, deep and dark sounds and also silence. Although this thriller was of a different genre, we still felt that it was appropriate to adopt a similar sound track, as we wanted our antagonist to seem as scary as the supernatural is, making 'him' more unpredictable and dangerous to the audience.