Creative Play - Week 7

I am interested in video editing, so I was highly anticipating this session when I discovered that it would be centred around editing sound into a movie clip deprived of its original sound. We would be completing this task using a technique known as ‘Foley’, which is where the sounds that are needed to be implementing into a film or video, are reproduced and recorded, often by getting sound from objects which are entirely different from the ones that are producing sound on film. They are then later edited into the film.

We decided to add sound to the ‘Nightmare Before Christmas clip’, as there are a range of actions which all seemed as though they would produce diverse sounds, and it would be interesting to see how we could replicate them using the objects that we had on offer. It also helped that I never seen this clip before, as I would have to guess the atmosphere and mood that the clip was going for. As we were watching the clip, I took note of all the sounds which I thought we would need to add, along with the times they would appear in the video, to help us later during editing.

This list is very accurate to our final product, and was crucial to helping us later, as it allowed us to record all the sound in chronological order, therefore making it easier to find them when it came to editing, and we knew exactly what objects we needed for what sound. I feel as though we found plenty of creative ways to replicate sounds. My favourite example of this, is the glove which we created which had paper clips sellotaped to each finger and thumb. This was used to recreate the sound of Jack Skellington’s hands as they made contact with an object, as I would imagine his ‘boney’ hands to have a very distinct sound, for example when his hands griped onto the banister of the stairs, we recorded me grabbing a pole whilst wearing the glove, and I feel as though the effect worked very well.

Some other examples of unusual objects used to recreate sound include:

-A ruler scraped against sandpaper to recreate the electric sparks from the battery

-My voice being used in several instances, such as the breeze at the start, the pop as the cherry is pulled out and the squish of the cherry

-A pen rolled across a table to recreate the turn of the dial on the microscope

I am impressed with how the final product turned out, aside from the irritating background noise present within some sound clips, which I was unfortunately unable to remove during the editing process. I do however know the reason for this, and how to prevent it next time, and that is by going into a recording studio or somewhere else where there is very minimal background noise. I was able however to slightly make the background noise less noticeable by fading out the starts and ends of the sound clips gradually in the editing software. The final design choice was to place a soundtrack across the clip, I decided to go with something which has a mysterious feel to it, but also somewhat of a playful nature, as represented by the clip, in the end I selected 'Aiden's Theme' from the 'Beyond Two Souls' soundtrack.

I thoroughly enjoyed the editing process and the making of the sounds, and this remains something that I am highly anticipating to implement into my own works in the future.

Here is the final clip -

https://vimeo.com/191291572