Drama Project – Edit Development

     For the sound editing process it was a mixture of difficult and very fun. Firstly I saw the edit, Sarah had done with the footage, after the holidays and I straight away felt pleased as I could follow the story and understand the characters motives instantly. I was pleased with this because we worried if we could manage to edit to footage together and make sense out of it for the audience. I was amazed that it was cut down from 8 minutes to the required 5 because there was a lot of vital footage to be added if the film was to make sense but we managed. I felt confident that with this I could begin the sound edit but this was just the beginning of a couple of problems that set us back a couple of days.

 

     Firstly for the first two days of my editing, Sound Pro editing software was not working probably as the wavelengths on the clips of sound were not appearing so therefore it made my task of sound editing a lot harder than it should have been. For someone like me who is quite new to Sound Pro I was instantly struggling because of this. I told the technician’s office and they tried their best to sort out the problem but then the next day with a different MAC it did it again. Eventually a technician installed an earlier version of sound Pro to my MAC that slightly showed the wavelength better.

 

     Secondly I became aware something no one noticed on the shoot which was Oliver got mixed up with scenes and therefore repeated the same scene and shots numerous of times. This led to me having to reconnect all the sound from scratch to the scenes they were recorded for. Also on some sound clips, it was not identified what the sound actually was so I had to guess what shot it was for. I eventually re-matched everything together my re-naming all the sound files.

 

     Once this was done I really enjoyed sound editing and felt I fully understood how Sound Pro works quite quickly. I began putting done an atmos to set the scene and then began syncing all of the sound together with the movements within the footage. For instance I added in footsteps, doors shutting, sound of bed sheets as he gets out of bed and etc. After we felt satisfied with it so far I then began to add the outside sounds we wanted to put in to create the aspect that the character has a huge connection with the outside.

 

     My biggest influence of this was the shot of his hand over the door handle while he contemplates opening the door. We build up the outside sounds such as bird sounds, cars and wind to reach a climax to then complete silence as the hand appears in the film. With this the viewer only really gets a kind of white noise like sound with the characters deep breathing and crying to give an impact on the audience. This was my most proud part of the film that I had contributed to.

 

     Overall even with the struggles at the beginning of my role I found it quite enjoyable and understood more than before on how important sound is to film as noticing that even a couple seconds of a sound can change the film massively.