Sound Design
Once we had completed titles, we moved on to adding sound into our thriller and began our sound research. We were given a sample of music to listen to called ‘Panic music’ and we began to draw inspiration from this and think about the type of music that would fit with our thriller for example the tone but also sounds of the instruments. We did our first bit of research by making notes, as we listened, of any words that came to mind to do with the music, this is the process of synaesthesia, when the senses are stimulated by music and sound, and created a soundscape wordle, displaying these words in collage form.
Here is the music we gained inspiration from:
And a copy of a wordle is below:
This task gave us some inspiration to begin looking at sound which is a vital part of the thriller which can have a great impact on the tone of the film and how it is conveyed to an audience, the music is what evokes the emotion from the audience and that is what ultimately makes it thrilling or scary. The keywords that appear most in this wordle seem to be chase, tension and panic, which gives us a starting point of what our music needs to convey.
To begin incorporating sound into our own thriller, we created a soundscape running order of all the sounds we thought we might need and a few details about them, for example, are the diegetic or nondiegetic, the moment in the film they are needed and whether we need to record them ourselves, in order to make sure we know where to source them from and if we actually need them.
A copy of the soundscape is linked below:
We were then lucky enough to have a short workshop from sound producer Nick Windsor, who provided us with sample sound effects that we could look at to use in our thriller and we were also provided some by our school.
Here are some of the sounds we need for our thriller and some options we’ve found that we could use:
- We need a camera sound effect, the sound of someone taking a photo which we can repeat throughout the sequence, here is one I found on YouTube of different types of camera flashes which we could experiment with and see which we like the best : several camera flashes
- Here is a sound effect of a variety of different female screams which we can use for our ending shot, we would obviously have to edit this in audacity and see which scream sounds more authentic:
- squeaking swing – This is a possible sound effect that Ellie found that we could use for our swing squeaking in the wind however, it was recorded as a Foley sound and we will have to alter it on audacity to make it more realistic
- We also found this effect of a windy forest which w could use to add depth to our film as the setting throughout I a windy, eerie forest and this sound effect will help bring that to life:
- We need a sound effect of someone walking over ground to emphasize footsteps of Hannah, we found this one however may need to record our own Foley sound as we need the ground to sound more like crunching leaves:
We will now begin to look further at recording our own sounds and also thinking about any music we might add in.