LO4: Evaluation

With my short film carrying the genre of mystery, I wanted the sound elements that I created/ added in to reflect this. Furthermore, more generally following the uses of sound in film, I used sound effect (most notably the heartbeat and heavy breathing) in order to represent how the different characters are feeling.

Techniques Used

Foley:

In creating my foley, I ended up using a lot of everyday household items and stationary. For example, for a scene where a character wearing handcuffs slams his hands down on the table, I recorded the sound of a box of paperclips slamming onto a table. Once I had recorded all of the foley, the main post-production I did on them was setting the volume levels to reflect how impactful and heavy the action should feel and whether the foley comes from off screen. I also found that it help to capture multiple similar sounds and layer them to create the desired sound.

Sound Effects:

The sound effects that I created (heartbeats, heavy breathing) mainly consisted of breathing heavily into a microphone and tapping my chest through thick clothing. The bulk of the sound effects effectiveness was created in post-production. To make these sound effects how I wanted them, I tended to apply the reverb effect, and I sometimes slowed them down in order to have them reflect the characters' emotions and mindsets in the scene.

Audience Feedback

To improve my short film I hosted a focus group and an online survey. Doing this allowed me to get new perspectives on my creation and suggestions on how to improve it. Once I had gained this feedback, I worked on making those improvements, how I responded to each is listed below.

Loud, Unbalanced Dialogue

There were multiple scenes containing Ava that had some loud and overly unbalanced dialogue. To fix this, I went through all the dialogue and set each one to a reasonable volume. I then selected all of the dialogue and opened the audio workspace.

In the audio workspace, in the Essential Sound panel I assigned it as 'dialogue' and pressed auto balance. This feature brings all of the audio levels of the selected tracks to a balanced level which can be finetuned to preference afterwards.

Gunshot Is Too Loud

This was a simple issue to fix, all I needed to do was right click on the sound effect in the timeline and select 'Audio Gain.' From there, I lowered the audio gain making the sound effect quieter.

Very Quiet Dialogue in End Scene

This was a similar fix to the gunshot sound effect, I simply right clicked on the dialogue clip in the timeline and selected 'Audio Gain.' From there, I increased the audio gain to make the dialogue louder.

Reflection

I found that the elements I recorded turned out quite effective and realistic while still reflecting the mood and tone of each scene. One thing I am especially proud of is that the pre-edited audio of the different foley and sound effects were quite clear and without static, and those that did have static in the background I was able to cleanly filter out. However, I struggled a lot with footsteps, and those that I had to add in sound a bit too much like clicking. This is most-likely a result of recording the footsteps on a wooden floor, in future I would record footsteps on different floor types in order to get a better sounding footstep.