Monday 27 April 2015

Sound

Sound design and mixing:

After all of the sounds were recorded, they were imported onto final cut pro and had to be placed in sync with each piece of film. This meant that there were a lot of tracks and I had to take it one at a time. I started out with the atmospheric sounds, fadein them in after the final ident. Then I did the foley on top of this. Various sounds were added such as the crow at the beginning and the burning of the stick. These came from an SFX Library (Incompetech) built within the editing software.
style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> One of the hardest parts of the sound design was creating a juxtaposition in environments. The forest sounded different to the shots with the antagonist, obviously as he was burning a stick for one but more importantly because the shots were taken beside a river. Therefore, we had to wild track this river.
Faders had to be added in to make the sounds more natural in parallel with the video. The process for this is below:
 1) Select track name:
Take down the volume of the original track to 0 Decibels.

 2) Select Modify > Add keyframe

3) Fix the keyframes:



Wild Track:

As we were filming outside on an SLR camera, with no access to mic and booms, a lot of the original footage was unusable as when the wind hit the mic, the sound distorted. Therefore, a lot of the sound had to come from wild tracks that were taken after the original film. The definition for this is below:
We wild tracked Emer's crying and also the atmospheric forest sounds. This was done to make everything sound more natural and the tracks could be synced up alongside the film.

Foley:

Emer's footsteps as she ran through the forest didn't pick up well on the camera's internal mic and therefore, had to be recreated in a recording studio. We set up a plastic bag with hard leaves and paper and then used a sure SM57 dynamic mic plugged into cubase. We mixed and mastered the track and then imported it to Final Cut Pro, our editing software.
The definition of foley is below and here is a picture of how we produced the sound and the link to the track also:

Soundtrack:

The soundtrack showed that our main protagonist's life may possibly be coming to an end. Our soundtrack was recorded on Garageband with a midi keyboard which, as a result, caused the soundtrack to sound very professional. Our group did the best we could to make it sound original and make the music fit the opening sequence. The kick drum helped to emphasise the urgency and state of panic as well as the violence that could potentially occur. It helped to make the clips with the fire seem truly terrifying and the audience would therefore feel fear for our main protagonist and her safety.
A brief musical analysis:

We started off recording lower strings, playing within the scale of D minor our track is in 4/4 and we basically played semibreve notes through out.
We then started recording the higher strings playing mostly D Db and C. These chromaticism's help to build tension in our track so we started the higher strings around 15 seconds after the lower strings started in order to build the texture of our soundtrack.
The tracks sounded slightly bare so I dropped the midi keyboard by an octave and added a drone from the start to the end of the track, I added a D drone in order to bulk out the track a bit more and to  create the atmosphere that we wanted the film to have.
Finally I decided to add a kick drum every 4 beats in order to build the tension of the witch hunt and I really like the stereotypical 'kill the witch' type soundtrack so I really liked the drums.
A similar sound track to this is Jane Eyre (2011) so we worked off of inspiration from this soundtrack.
Below are screenshots of the recording process and the links to our final product on soundcloud:

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