I was responsible for the sound design in our piece. I wanted to have music in the background in some parts of the extract, and we enjoyed the music soundtrack from Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006), but wanted the piece to be more dream-like. So after cutting the sound up and applying it to the appropriate places, we filtered echoes and reverberation into it and achieved the desired sound we were after. I think it goes well with the nature sounds of birds and wind in the background, making the forest location creepy.
For our dialogue, we considered having a voice over during the entire extract, as influenced by Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), but decided on just having dialogue, because we also have non-diegetic sound in the extract, and it would be too much to have both. All dialogue in our piece is dubbed over, and luckily synced perfectly when applied, but we encountered some problems whilst we were recording. For example, when our actress speaks in the extract, there is a slight buzzing which the microphone picked up from an electronic appliance in the room, and we couldn’t re-record this. However, this sound adds to her character, because she is a hallucination, therefore is not real and neither is her speech, so the sound wouldn’t be as clear as our main character’s voice because she isn’t really there.
The other sounds that we recorded came out well in the extract. We spent a few lessons recording any sounds we could think of that could create an effect. We tried whispers, heartbeats, and paced breathing, but none of these sounds came out how we wanted them; the whispers were really weak when put with the music, the heartbeat wasn’t needed in any of the scenes we had shot and since our character is more confused than scared, paced breathing was pointless. In the film our main character is walking through the forest, so for recording the sound of footsteps our actor held the camera by his feet and walked through the leaves which, when listened back to, sounded clear and crisp.
At the end of the extract, the main character reads out the definition of schizophrenia, and realises this is what he has and shuts the book. I thought about recording this and having it as the ending of the extract and the sound; a complete blackout. However, as we have piano music in the background, we decided it would have more effect to fade the music out after the blackout rather than to just cut it off completely. It also lets the audience see his reaction. We included an overhead view of the dictionary he is reading out of (as seen bottom right in the screen grab) so the audience can see everything from his perspective. We also added a close up of the definition itself over the top which faded out. However the close up wasn't needed, as 'George' is reading aloud, and it seems too much is going on. This realisation may have been more useful at the start of the extract, as in reality most schizophrenics don’t know that they have schizophrenia, and it may have been better to inform the audience of the illness before he started hallucinating.
The screen grabs above show a range of different shots we used in our extract, including a POV shot, long shots, medium shots and an establishing shot. I think that the blurred POV shot is one of the most effective, because it suggests that the female character 'Jess' is a hallucination. We only have two locations in our extract: a forest and a schoolroom. We wanted to emphasize the difference between these two locations; the forest is the creepy, unreal place where the main character hallucinates, and the schoolroom is familiar, comfortable, and ultimately the place where 'George' finds out he has schizophrenia. I wanted the sound to be different in these two places, so in the schoolroom, we lost the nature sounds, the footsteps, and loud music, and were left with just the character’s voice and softer music. When we were filming in that space, we could hear students walking past, laughing and chatting. At the time we decided not to include this, because we wanted the character to be alone, and if you cannot hear anyone else he is completely isolated. Looking at the bottom left image above, it is not apparent that the second location is a schoolroom, which is something we could have made clearer– maybe by adding in the sounds of students, some more school props or even a teacher walking past would have made it more understandable.
I am happy with what we achieved in our extract in how the narrative, sound and cinematography came together, but there are certain areas in the narrative and elements in the set and sound design which if improved would have made the film more coherent.
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