Editing Process (sound)

Sound is a vital part to creating a good production, ever since the start we have done research to help us understand what key elements of sound we should include. Initially we planned for a slow pace pain style background piece, even though it took a long time to find an appropriate piece of sound we managed to find multiple clips which we could incorporate into different parts of our film. We required a slightly more upbeat sound to help create some optimistic and happy emotions around the initial part of the documentary. The second part where our 2nd character is introduced needed a more dull sound as we wanted it to be in a negative aspect, finally we used silence for the middle part as it helped create a sensation of seriousness. Lastly we used a very optimistic sound once our piece comes together and the resolution is found.

To ensure the quality of the sound we decreased the volume of the sound clips throughout to level -6 to - 12, this was recommend by a friend who said that levelling out the sound is important as it should nook peak at any times in the piece.

All the background music we used came from this website:
http://www.audionetwork.com/browse/m/production-genre/documentary
It enabled us to use free background music and it had a wide variety.

 

This is part of the editing process, below you can see for our establishing shots which is highlighted by the yellow box. This is the opening scene therefore it is essential that this piece of sound worked well as it leaves a lasting impression for the rest of the film. We reused the same piece, it is simple to do as once you download the file you can import it. Within final cut pro we were able to edit the sound clip to fit well, this meant making it a lot shorter and adding fades to certain parts so it fits in.

Here at the top left of the screen you can see some of the sound clips we were working with, as I mentioned we used multiple sound clips. Top left is the raw files, once they have been pasted into the below bar we can edit them to fit our piece.

The highlighted yellow box is the part of the clip we used, it was about 17 minutes long and we only required certain parts of it which is once highlighted 03:05 minutes. This part was then pasted into our piece and reused multiple times throughout.

A very important part of sound are the sound effects, we did not use any of the original audio from when we filmed. The reason for this was because we lacked a professional mic. We obviously used a voice over, this was recorded with a professional RODE mic which was then imported into Final Cut Pro and edited to fit the piece. The sound effects we used were rather simple, this meant we were able to find them all on Final Cut Pro, over this you can see the sound effects we used which includes bird sounds, water running, slamming doors.