SOUND

 MUSIC TO MY EARS

Sound is a really important part of the editing process. We take it for granted when consuming media, but what we hear--from instrumentals in the background to the plop of a raindrop--has a drastic effect on the way we view something.

For our film, most sound was recorded at the time of filming. Our diegetic sound includes dialogue and sounds caused by the movement of characters. Sound we added in was mainly just music, both diegetic and non-diegetic. 

We obtained our music from this YouTube channel Audio Library with tons of copyright free music.

Nicole was the person who edited sound as it was done on the same application we used to edit the video aspects. Sarah and I scoured the YouTube channel to find music that fit the vibe of the clips we needed music in.

For the dressing room scene, we needed something very punk rock with a bit of bass to it so that it would be easy to make it seem like it was coming from the other room where the show was taking place. We settled on this song, The Profiteers by Rations. To achieve the "other room" effect, we attempted to place the actual recording and then insert another sound clip of white noise to drown that out, but it was unsuccessful since iMovie always decided to mute one or the other. Instead, Nicole recorded audio while the song was playing on her phone a little ways away from the computer to achieve a distanced sound effect.

The next scene we needed music for was the getting ready scene. I figured we would go with something very pop-like to match with the coming of age getting ready trope, but we didn't want something super pop. We ended up deciding to stick with the rock theme to contrast with Juliet's basic look, leaving room for the change to come. This is the only music we added that is non-diegetic. I picked out a couple songs I thought would fit, then Sarah made the ultimate decision to go with Free Dog by Silent Partner. 

Finally, we needed sound for the car ride, this one would be just an all-around pop tune to emphasize the awkwardness of the unspoken hanging in the air between Juliet and her mother in the car ride. We had it start up immediately when Juliet's mom turns the car on. I picked the song for this one, It Ain't Over by Vendredi.

We had plans of inserting a clip of some backstage worker knocking on the door that transitions into Juliet's mom waking her up, but the sound layering was really giving us problems. The same issue proved true with inserting an alarm instead. The way that scene begins now is just with the non-diegetic music, which is alright with me.

I'm grateful for cameras recording both audio and visual content because I can't imagine what we'd have done if we needed to recreate a lot of the sounds. We made sure to capture good sound without background noise interfering so we didn't have to go to the foley stage and make some crazy things happen.

That's all for sound editing, thanks for reading!