Audio in our Thriller

Audio and sound is an essential part of a thriller in order to set the mood for the film and create tension for the audience. Non-diegetic and diegetic sound helps emphasise the genre of the thriller by adding a sense of mystery within it.  In order to use sound in our thriller we adjusted the audio in the clips and downloaded non copy right sounds from the internet. For some parts we feel suspense is made from no music and creates a more natural sounding environment and so therefore is more effective for our audience. Additionally, we tried to attempt creating our own sound effects using a knife and a watermelon to give off the effect of a stabbing noise.

Adjusting Audio from our filmed clips:
For most of our clips we filmed, the sound was good and we did not need to change anything but for some this was not the case. To increase suspense we increased the decibels of a clip where you can hear our actor Lucy breathing heavily as this is also a POV shot is worked well as it made the viewer more aware the shot is from her point of view if they can hear her breathing. This would also help the audience emphasise with the character as they can understand how scared she is within the scene. Also in this scene our protagonist is scraping a knife against the wall, because there is no music in this scene, adjusting the sound of knife scrapping and by making it louder this put an emphasis on our actors actions. When our victim gets stabbed in the film she screams loudly, however we wanted the scream to be longer so that it connects the audio of that scene and the next scene smoothly, therefore I got our actor so scream again but for longer, this audio was now correct. We also held auditions for an 'evil laugh', Mr Woods laugh seemed most realistic so we manipulated it make the pitch higher and more scary, this manipulation worked well as it seemed very realistic.

Music:
One of the conventions for the thriller genre is suspenseful music that engages the audiences and creates a sense of tension and mystery within the film. Because of this, we decided we needed to add some slow pace and low pitch music in order to emphasise the suspense within our film. On Youtube we found some music which we think fitted well with the opening pan of the film because the pan on the polaroids is not fast, creating suspense and mystery, to add even more suspense to the audience we wanted slow music which works with the slow pace of the visuals. The music below is the one we chose, we checked the comments to see if we were allowed to download it without it being copyright to the composer, and it is okay to download.

We used 13 seconds of it, however our clip was longer so we had to copy and paste the audio multiple times, this worked because the sound it self repeats notes over and over agai


Additionally, we included more music into our film via youtube as we needed to insert music when our final title is revealed on screen. Because our final title had a dramatic sense to it, we wanted to add music that suited this. Fortunately we found music that fits perfectly with this. 



More music we used was for the credits at the beginning of our film, we felt as though in our first draft that the credits without sound would make it more suspenseful and create a build up until the credits ended and the narrative began. However after receiving audience feedback we soon learned that the audience were finding the credits not very suspenseful and too long. We found some music which is the right suspenseful beat we were looking for and put it into our film, we manipulated the sound to a pace of 85% so this created even more suspense.

Sound effects:
For our thriller we wanted to involve some sound affects to again create suspense and a sense of realness. we also didn't want our sounds to sound too fake and unrealistic so we decided to try and create some sounds ourself.

Our thriller involves a stabbing sound and we did some research online and found out that watermelon was commonly used as a realistic sound for stabbing flesh. I set up a camera and brought a watermelon, I then started stabbing it with a knife.

However after doing this we quickly decided it didn't work with our film as we only needed a single stab, and there was single stabbing sound when I stabbed the watermelon also it sounded very plastic like and artificial. Fortunately we went onto YouTube and discovered a perfect sound affect that works well with out film. We entered the sound into our film and edited it so it would be long enough for our scene.

Another sound affect used was a door slam. Unfortunately during filming a scene we were filming was cut into 2 scenes therefore the door slamming in the last scene does not sound right, so we needed to search for some free non copyright audio sound of a door slamming shut. We found a side called 'Freesound.org'. This sound worked perfectly for our film, we cut our the part we didn't need.



 Furthermore, we used a heart beat, emphasis the fear upon our victim. We found this audio on YouTube and edited it into our film is works very well and does increase suspense and develops the characters understanding of our victims fear.



The final sound affect we used was the one we used throughout most of our film. We decided not to have silence throughout our film and also we didn't feel like music would be a s suspenseful either. So ewe decided to use some sound affects that would emphasise the horrifying position our victim is in whilst also complying to the conventions of a thriller or scary lighting and stormy weather in the background sound. This helped to create a sense of realism and to emphasise the idea of a isolated location. We increased some of sound of lightening at parts where it needed to be more dramatic, e.g. when the protagonist eye-line match is shown. However we made sure not to put this sound in to the flashback scene as that would be an inaccurate representation of time. We copy and pasted the audio file a few times throughout the film as background sound, we are very happy with this sound. Also we do not have to give credit to the composer as they wrote "You don't have to worry about crediting this sound if you are using it for non-commercial projects unless you want to (e.g. educational or non-profit activities), but if you use the sound for a commercial project you must credit the sound." This is good because our film is non-commercial and non-profit, therefore we were allowed to download the sound.

Account of Editing

On the day of our filming, we chose to shoot each piece of footage multiple times. This proved useful to us when editing as we were able to discard the shots that weren’t up to our standards. We started out by watching each video we took a few times and then comparing them to one another. From this we discarded the shots that were inaccurate, the inaccuracies could have included: incorrect lighting, not in focus, wrong angles etc.…

For our group, it was easy for us to make our narrative make sense as we put the clips in the order we chose when making our story board, as we changed our story board around a few times to make sure it made the narrative could be followed. However, although we used our storyboard to help us when putting out footage in order, it had a minimum amount if help in editing as we needed to show that certain clips were in the past and so therefore we needed to use the correct editing to show this and allow the audience to understand the narrative. When showing the flashback scene, I think we succeeded in making the narrative make sense as we changed the footage to black and white and made it distorted, showing that it is not in the current tense. 

We were only allowed to use non copy right sounds and music, this proved difficult to us as the music we wanted for our thriller was founded on YouTube and not on a non-copy right sounds website. We then decided to email the owner of the piece of music asking for his permission to use his piece of music. We also tried to make our own sounds such as the stabbing sound, the laugh and the scraping sound. We managed to use our own laugh and a real scraping sound however, the stabbing sound sounded too unrealistic so we got this from a non-copy right music website. Additionally, we all our dialogue used for diegetic and filmed in real life on the day, this made it easy when editing as the dialogue always matched the events that were happening on the screen.
Furthermore, once we finished editing and got feedback from our audience, we decided to change a few things which included:


- Changing the pitch of the laugh, making it more fitting for our actor as the laugh was too low pitch


- We changed the music at the end of our title sequence as it was too fast and not as sinister as the rest of our opening sequence


- We changed the opacity on one of our effects, when in the flashback scene to make it subtler and less obvious that editing was used on that clip




- We changed the scream of one of our actors, as it accidentally got cut off, meaning it was not as smooth as we would have liked it to be.

When putting in our opening credits, it was quite difficult to decide where to place them throughout. Firstly, we tried to spread them evenly throughout the opening, however we saw that this did not work as it interrupted the flow of our film and so therefore it did not look right. Because of this, we decided to put the majority of the titles at the beginning of the film before any other footage played in order to put emphasis on the titles and to make sure the rest of our film flowed smoothly. We placed the title at the end of our opening sequence for emphasis and to show. Furthermore, we also chose for the font of our credits to be in bold and in the colour red, we chose bold in order for it to stand out and we chose the red as it is a stereotypical colour for thriller films as it represents blood and violence. We worked really well as a group and contributed the editing process equally. An example, of something i helped with was that i helped to find the music for the opening scene with the pan.

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Opening Credits