Sound Design

Our short film extract is set in the forest, so my original ideas for sound were footsteps, breathing, nature sounds including birds and wind (obtained from youtube). I thought maybe a heartbeat could be effective, with it pacign whenever our main character hallucinates, but i don't want to over-complicate the extract and have too many things happening at once.

It took lots of time to record all of these different sounds. To get the footstep sounds, I got our main actor playing George to hold the camera close to his feet and walk over leaves. The sounds of his frustration as he struggles to figure out what is going on, the book shutting at the end and voiceovers were recorded shut up in a classroom. We had a small problem, because in the film he trips over a log, and we didn't know how to create this sound, so we actually just got him to trip over on purpose and recorded that sound.

The dubs of the character's voices luckily synced really well, and we recorded those seperately, however the room we recorded them in had an electric appliance in the room so there is a slight buzzing over the top of the recording, but i did not notice this until it was too late and the actor was away so we couldn't re-record it - i don't think it sounds bad though; it can be seen as dreamy dialogue.

The soundtrack i decided to use from Pan's Labyrinth, because it is very creepy and good for our extract, as it is a psychological thriller idea. We filtered echo and reverberation over it to give it a dreamy effect. I wasn't actually there when this was done, as i was ill, but our editor cut up the soundtrack before it was filtered and put fades in the appropriate places. For example, around halfway through the extract, our main character george bends down, and behind him is his hallucination standing there, and that is where the music comes in.

There are two locations that are used for our film, the forest and a school room. In the school our main character discovers what he has, when he reads about schizophrenia, and i thought about adding in some students maybe walking past (what was actually happening as we filmed), and their footsteps and laughter, but the point was to make George feel isolated and trapped in with his disorder. So it's just George talking, and then a final shutting of the book.

In the film, George tries phoning his friend, but there is no answer. For this i actually wanted to use a voicemail sound from the phone, but when we tried to record this it wasn't coming out how i wanted it, so i ended up finding a phone ringing sound, and a beeping sound (for the keypad) so he's not waiting for the voicemail at all, just hanging up.

I think that in adding sound to the film it is really difficult to get the right atmosphere, but a group decision was to not add too many bodily sounds such as breathing and a heartbeat, to keep it more dream-like.