When creating the audio for our short film, there are various things that we need to keep in mind. First of all, legal and ethical issues are most important with audio tracks. For example, using copyrighted audio tracks would result in being asked to either: remove the audio, take the video down, pay a fine and in serious cases prison/court dates. This means that we needed to use music that we either had permission to use, or music that was completely royalty free.
It is also important to consider background noise, dialogue noise and the quality of the audio such as making sure the levels are equal, and that the main body of audio is not overridden by any other sounds. For some of these clips, we used Adobe Audio Enhancer to make the audio clearer and more professional. When recording audio, and inputting foley audio for our film, we made sure to keep these important ways of improving audio in mind to achieve the best quality.
The music and sound effects that we used were taken from royalty free YouTube videos. This means that we would have no issues with copyright as the clips are free to use. We created an audio asset log to file all of the audio samples that we used.
Throughout our film we only had a subtle, minimal soundtrack because the genre of our film conventionally does not heavily rely on the soundtrack. Background was used at the starting travel sequence, during the montage sequence and with the end credits.
During the montage sequence, in order to time shots with the pace of the music, some of the audio files needed to be extended to perfectly fit with the clip length. For this, the remix option was used in adobe Premiere Pro which extended the audio clips.
When using two audio clips at the same time, or switching between audio samples, we decided to either cross fade the audio in a linear way, or use an exponential crossfade. this means that the audio files will seamlessly merge, and it will not be noticeable to an audience.
For example, in the screenshot here, the yellow tags at the end show where the fade has been added to the file. This ensures that the files don't stop abruptly throughout the film and that the audio merge is professional quality.
During the conversation sequence outside the abandoned house in our film, there was a main road which was loud and busy. This meant that the audio from these clips was very difficult to pick up, and was not the level of quality that we wanted. Some of the clips audio quality was fine, however some of them were overpowered by the sound of moving traffic behind the protagonist. This meant that we needed to adjust the levels of the files, which affected the clips both positively and negatively. positively, the dialogue was much easier to hear. However, lots of small details such as footsteps were no longer in the audio, so we replaced them with royalty free foley sound effects.
In order to fix the audio in the clips rather than using Adobe Audio Enhancer, which rather than fixing the clips warped them because of the audio volume, we used the denoise audio effect to reduce the background noise. We then added the foley track over this.
Diegetic Sound -
Most of our film was shot using diegetic sound to back the footage. This is because of the genre of the film, which is a thriller. These style of films often rely heavily on diegetic sound that the character would be hearing, and how that affects them whilst they are on screen. This involves sounds such as background noise, which is footsteps, environment, some music and dialogue. These are all very important key parts of our film, and serve different purposes.
We use environmental sound recorded as foley and from the footage to achieve realism. This makes the shot feel real as the sounds we are all used to when outside are present in the film and not interfered with by any unnatural sounds.
Sounds such as Dialogue are used primarily to support the narrative. For example, the conversation sequence outside of the house. All dialogue in this scene is used solely to support the narrative.
Non-Diegetic Sound -
Non-Diegetic sound is very important in a film from the viewers perspective.
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