With the visuals of my short film more or less finalised, I wanted to move over to the sound design. This includes the diegetic audio and the non-diegetic soundtrack. In this post I am going to talk about how I edited the audio of my film to have a greater impact on the effect of the narrative.
For the opening scene where Dylan is sat in the car, I wanted the audio to have the effect of being confined, of being shut away from the outside world, because this really captures Dylan's isolation in the current moment. I could have reduced the sound or muted it completely to create an eerie silence, or the third option was to search through iMovie's list of stock audio effects and see whether one of them fit the criteria I needed. As shown in the screenshot above, the muffled effect was impactful, because it slightly distorted the sound and made the viewer feel slightly detached from the interior.
However, in the end I opted to mute all of the clips taking place with the voiceover, because the silence was balanced by the narration over the top. This allows the visuals of the film to be complemented only by the voiceover, which is given sole focus by muting the audio of the clips themselves. Therefore the contextual information given by the narration is not imposed on by the background noise of the clips.
The narration itself was slightly inhibited by the fact that there was a muffled sound in the background which lingered for the whole voiceover. In order to get rid of this, I used the simple checkbox in iMovie (shown in the screenshot above) called 'reduce background noise' and by selecting this it instantly got rid of the muffled audio and gave my voiceover a much crisper sound.
What I didn't like about the sound of the opening scene was how by muting the clips the film would be silent through the opening title, because the voiceover would be finished by this point. And since the clip that comes after the title will have sound the audio contrast becomes too apparent and discontinuous. To counteract this I ensured that the scene before the title, although quiet, would still have some degree of sound to make the audio transition more fluidly. The audio of that clip captures Dylan breathing heavily, and I thought that I could copy this over the title to give the eerie effect of Dylan's erratic breathing.
I decided against this when I found something better in the stock audio effects. There was a sound effect of 'Sports Car Passing' that sounds as though a car races in from far away and then disappears into the distance, building and then diffusing sound. Since my film and my narration are largely reliant on the idea that the protagonist's brother died in a car crash, I thought that this would be very relevant and also have the eerie effect needed to bridge the two clips either side of the title. It fades out nicely into the following clip, and I think it works perfectly for both the audio transition and the symbolic value of the overall narrative.
Because the clips after the titles start to introduce the exterior world beyond the confines of the car, I thought that it was important to diegetically acknowledge this. So the shots of the Father walking along are noticeably more audible to emphasise the contrast between Dylan's eerie silence and the Father's confident strides.
Some of the shots, although visually pleasing, suffered from the background sounds of the camera. In the shot above, for example, the microphone picked up the minor movements of the camera as it panned across. I tried reducing the background noise but this only got rid of the sounds of the trees and the birds, and so I decided that I could mute the clip altogether and copy the audio from another clip. To do this I detached the audio from the clip preceding it and pasted it over the muted shot to create a more cohesive sound bridge, and one that didn't involve picking up the noise of the camera.
The audio for certain shots I left completely untouched. The juxtapositions of the characters walking, for example, is something that in terms of sound didn't need enhancing or reducing. The sound of the footsteps complemented the panic and increasing intensity and so I didn't feel that it needed to change at all. This was the same with a lot of my shots, where the audio itself was fine, but just need minor alterations to get rid of any scuffling or reduce the sometimes overwhelming sound of walking. Here, however, the sound of walking is the main priority and so for this reason it needed to be loud and demanding.
Throughout a lot of my shots during the Big Mead sequence (both parts), there were lots of natural sound effects in the background due to the natural environment we were filming in. When watching my film, bird song and the swaying of trees are particularly audible. I wanted to draw specific attention to the shot above, because the background noise here is crows chirping. In this shot Dylan is raising the gun in preparation to shoot the Father, and since crows are often symbols of death and ominous foreboding, I thought that this sound was perfectly supportive of the tone of the shot.
The idea of the scene where the Son enters the narrative was for him to be heard before he is seen. Therefore I didn't reduce the sound or the background noise for this sequence of shots because the Son's voice needed to be faint but still completely surprising. The sound of a voice in the film for the first time since the narration helps to disrupt the pace and interrupt the focus on the sole two characters up to this point.
In the top right corner you can see that I changed the audio effect here to 'Muffled'. This is one of my favourite shots, and muffling the sound drew more focus to Dylan's breathing and the echo of his breath. In my opinion it adds quite an intimate, emotive tone to the scene because as well as zooming in on the character, the shot also becomes more audibly enclosed and so its as though the protagonist is feeling trapped by the scenario.
For the arc shot around Dylan along the Luccombe Road there were noticeable sounds of wind and footsteps as the camera circles around. However I couldn't silence the clip because in the background the faint sound of the car door shutting is heard, which I need for continuity because the next shot of the car is when its driving off. So even though the sound is quite distorted in this clip, I am hoping that maybe adding a non-diegetic soundtrack over the top could reduce this noise.
The epilogue scene needed to be quite like a silent unravelling for the Father, and so I reduced the sound of each shot here to around 30% so that it wasn't intrusive or overwhelming. It accompanies the emotion of the scene nicely, because the silence can be a solemn or uplifting tranquility.
With the diegetic sound changed and altered, my next post will be my attempts to create a non-diegetic soundtrack to go over the top of some of the more emotive sequences. In the meantime, this is my updated cut of the film, with all the new changes in sound:
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