Editing Sound + Clips

How it was done…

Callum Pearce

Intro

For the introduction of “Predator Productions”, although they combine together in the end to become one image separated, I had to separated the images using Adobe Photoshop CS6 to ensure that the split between the panther was even. Once this was done I had to create a custom transition on Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 so that the images would slide in and stop in the exact place I wanted it. I decided to split the image into 3 sectors as it creates a more diverse intro to the film and is much more interesting than a simple image being placed onto a screen with no particular movement. Once the images had made their way onto the screen, it was time for the text to appear to label the name of the company. As there had already been movement with the images appearing I felt it was suitable to reduce the amount of movement with the text as I also tested out a similar transition from the text to the images and it seemed as if there was too much going on and it may confuse the viewer.

Additional Sounds

There were two additional sound effects that we had to include in the final task to make the whole production seem realistic to the view. The first one was the vibration of the mobile phone on the desk to alert the inspector of an unknown caller, which first of all became a problem whilst filming as the vibration was not loud enough when trying to film it live in the clip and it was hard to get the timing right. Also the signal from the phone created a distortion in the volume of the microphone which interfered with the sound of the current happenings. We avoided this issue by recording the sound of the vibration separately and put it in after as circled in red in the images above. The second input of additional sound was the gun shot which was a necessity for this part as it created realism and the loud sound effect would thrill the audience. As I got the gun shot sound effect from a free online website, it was not originally exactly how I wanted it to sound so I had to adjust the speed of the shot and also fade out the sound at the end of the shot to have a smooth transition with the rest of the film. This is highlighted in the blue circle above.

Dialogue

For the dialogue we used a Rode Videomic Mini Pro Shotgun which helped us obtain a good, clear audio to the film however as found whilst filming and editing our preliminary, it often tend to happen that the transition of different sound clips of a conversation was no as smooth as it could have been. After learning from this, in the main task I had to ensure that there was a smooth, flowing motion to the conversation scene taking place and to make sure of this I overlapped the clips only by a slight amount and faded out the volume of each sound slowly so that there were no sudden changes in sound and the conversation sounded as if it was all at once rather than multiple different shots after stopping and starting. This is shown in the image above on the left by making the clips in different rows so that the sound could blend in with the next clip instead of overwriting it.

Soundtrack

I found the soundtrack for the main part of the film in a video on YouTube and once I had got in contact with the owner and gained permission to use it I downloaded it and inserted it in. However the were a few minor adjustments that I did had to make when using this as I had to adjust the speed of the original sound as it was too fast so I reduced the speed from 100% to 84.39% as this fitted better with the footage that was being shown. Also at the conversation section of the introduction to the film, I had to lower the volume so that the music did not over power the discussion that was going on. Finally I had to cut and go to a different section of the music as it was originally over 3 minutes long, meaning that it was important to crop it down to the correct length. But as shown in the red circle above, I inserted a part later on in the track where the tempo was a lot faster and the pitch had changed which suited to the scene more. Once this part of the soundtrack was chosen it was important that the 2 were blended together so there was so obvious change in parts of the recording.