The journey to completing the sound design will be a complicated and tedious one. The sound design for this project, will create a huge impact on our short film and bring the atmosphere of the film to life.
The first thing I did was sift through the base audio connected to our used film clips, tidying the clips up where needed. I added small fades to some of the audio clips so they aren’t so harsh and abrupt when ending and blending the vocal audio together. Finally, for this process, I added all of the vocal audio clips into Adobe audition using the linked creative cloud and placed the audio clips onto one single track. I then changed the levels of the different audio clips so that they all matched and weren’t peeking or distorting.
The next step was to place the various SFX throughout the film. This was a long process not only obtaining the SFX but fitting them into the corresponding places to create atmosphere throughout the film. To source the SFX I used some of the audio recorded from film days EG, birds tweeting and footsteps, also from various sources online and on youtube.
From this point, the final part of constructing the sound web was adding the soundtrack. One of the problems I had run into previously was YouTube taking my projects down due to copyrighted music used in my projects. After some research and working on a time & budget I had decided it would be best to use music provided through YouTube’s unlicensed library. This library offers hundreds of unlicensed tracks and allows you to download and use them for free, with mention of the artists in your video bio. After some searching, I found my preferred tracks and placed them accordingly throughout the film.
When I was happy with the placement of all the separate audio, the final job was to go through and master the levels. Using a mix of Adobe Premiere Pro and Audition I used various effects to blend the audio together and create a corresponding sound web. You can find the finished project here.
Final thoughts.
I feel this project went really well in terms of the audio. I planned ahead well and made sure I recorded the correct sounds on site. I found researching soundtracks from various vampire films helped in choosing the soundtrack for our film. I’ve been practicing various different editing skills in Audition, I had used some of these new techniques in this project and feel they went well but better understanding will help in the future. Again my major issue was with time frame allowed to complete the audio. In future I will stress to my groups to give me the necessary time needed to complete the audio.
REDEMPTION 