Sound Journal

I was in charge in finding and editing the sound for our short film. We decided to use intertexuality in our piece, and so I had to find various theme songs from famous action films. I found the following: o The Good the Bad and the Ugly (western theme tune) o Star Wars Imperial March o The Matrix Theme Song o The Mission Impossible Theme Song I also found dreamy, romantic music for when Charlotte enters, as well as Elevator music in a Star Wars style for when the teacher is in the staffroom. I found all of these on Youtube, and used Youtube Converter to convert them into an mp3 format. I then had to drag them into the timeline before cutting the music down to specific parts which I wanted to include in the film. I then had to align the music with the film footage so that the music matched the action in the film. This was sometimes difficult, as occasionally the music didnt match the action, therefore I had to change the speed of the music or sometimes cut it down, in order to make it fit, for a professional look. Making the transition from one song to another was the most difficult part of the process, as blending two different tracks often sounded unprofessional. Therefore I had to change the sound levels at the start and end of each track to make the transitions smooth. I was also in charge of finding sound effects for the film. I was planning on doing most of this using Soundtrack Pro, however I found that this software didnt have many of the sound effects that I needed for the film. So I resulted in using various free sound effect websites to find any sounds that I didnt have. This posed many problems for me however, as it was extremely time consuming and, because we had a small budget, the sounds had to be free. Not only were these very hard to find, but when I did find some, they were often not suitable or poor quality. Despite this, I eventually managed to find all of the sound effects needed. When I had finally found all the needed sound effects, I also had to edit them into the film in the same way I did the music. Some sounds did not fit well into the piece, and so this resulted in me finding replacements. I also had to lengthen/shorten some of these sounds. I found finding and editing the sound the most difficult part of this process, as well as the most time consuming. All in all, it took me around 3 and 30 minutes to find all of the music and sounds needed, and around 3 hours 15 minutes to edit all of the sound and make it sound professional.