Film Opening - Sound Improvements

One of the main improvements we received most for our film opening was on sound. We received feedback on the sound that said we needed to add sound in our film opening where it was silent in places as well as create more tension and suspense towards the end using the non-diegetic soundtrack. As well as this some people said they could hear laughing and speaking in the shot where the dog barks as we had to use commands and gestures to make the dog bark when we wanted.

We started by zooming into the scene where the dog barks and listened carefully to hear the laughing and speaking, we then cut the shot where the unwanted sounds could be heard and removed the sound so that when played back you couldn't hear them. This meant that the only sound that could be heard was the dog barking and there were no distracting noises in the background.



 

We then altered the use of the non-diegetic soundtrack so that it didn't fade out like before but instead built up and got more tense and the film was played. We used the same section of the soundtrack from the beginning so that there were no silent sections without any sound. We made sure that the soundtracks had a smooth transition and that you couldn't tell that we had added in another section of soundtrack.





As the film opening began to end we decided that there wasn't enough build up in the soundtrack to create suspense and tension as the killer caught up with the girl. Therefore we added another part of the soundtrack where the sound built up and created a lot of suspense and added it in over the top of the original soundtrack so that the sound gradually built up, getting louder and more tense as it neared the end. We also increased the volume of the suspense soundtrack so that it got a lot louder as the girl is caught by the killer. This is then further enhanced by the loud 'boom' sound at the end of the film opening when the film title appears as it is loud and effective at the end.

When we watched it back we thought it would be effective to add in some more sound as the girl begins running in order to build up more tension throughout the chase scenes. In order to do this we found a short soundtrack where the sound slowly builds and creates tension and then remains steady for a while and inserted it as the chase scene begins. This meant that there was more suspense as the killer caught up with the girl which made the ending tense. The sound then suddenly drops and builds again very quickly at the end when the girl falls and is killed, making a very tense and dramatic ending.