Our Final Trailer

Sound

Editing our film trailer with sound

As you can see we spent a substantial amount of time with sound as it we knew it played a vital part towards our film trailer. When we first imported all the our film clips onto Final Cut Pro and had cut it down with all of the irrelevant scenes and making it concise, we realized that our trailer was unpleasant to watch and we thought that our clip was really poor to produce a trailer. However, once looking at instrumental soundtracks and influences from other films and applied this to Final Cut Pro, we then realised it made a massive change and impact. We then spent some time onto where we thought each soundtrack can be used appropriately for each scenes.

This image shows how we also controlled the sound of the footage taken whilst filming. We had to constantly adjust sound levels so that they don't disrupt the sound of the clip and ensure that all the voiceover's and scripts is clear. 

Whilst editing, we realised that some parts of the voiceover was not clear and there was background noises in which we was unable to have control over. Surprisingly, after spending some time trying to resolve this situation, we found the auto enhance audio function which allowed us to enhance sound levels. This allowed to us to have control over the loudsness of the audio, hum removal and background noise removal. This was extremely ideal to resolve our problems with sound as this effectively improved the overall quality of our trailer. After applying the auto enhance functions to the necessary audios, we realised that this produced a smoother outcome. 

In some cases, Final Cut Pro indicated whether the loudness of the audio, hum or background noise was a concern. This therefore required us to adjust the functions until it shows a green tick, meaning that the issue is corrected. From this we then ensured that all the audio had been adjusted at a appropriate scale via the indications of the green ticks and red cautions from the auto enhance audio function. 

We also noticed that as the voiceover was broken down throughout our film trailer, the audio enhancements had varied meaning that it sounded as if the voiceover had taken place at different times/location. This therefore meant that we had to improve our continuity and use the match audio function which detects the audio enhancements in one audio clip and then can be applied to another. We therefore extracted the audio enhancement from one audio clip and then applied it to all the other voiceover clips. 

We also added a gun shot effect in our film trailer as we thought that this would increase realism and profession. We increased the sound levels of the gun shot effect to add more suspense and audience attention. We thought this generally worked well however would've looked even better with a muzzle flash. Unfortunately, after experimenting with a range of muzzle flash, we was unable to find one which looked realistic and professional. Subsequently, we thought it'll be best kept without the muzzle flash and just have the sound effect as the scene itself doesn't expose much of the shooting.

Here was an example of or opening sequence from AS Media, where we used a muzzle flash and we genuinely thought that the effect was pretty impractical...

Our Final unedited Voiceover!!!!

Creating the Voice Over...

We then begun discussing what should the voice over be and then begun script writing. We had to include aspects such as relevant information about the story, main characters and some of the themes which are in the film. Here is our first draft for the voiceover.

We read out our voiceover to a few people and asked them for feedback on it. As you can see from above they believed that the last sentence abruptly ends, and is not a powerful ending. They also thought that it was rather polite sounding which made it seem weak where it was meant to be strong and powerful. 

We made changes from our first draft and added a sentence in the end which we thought was quite dramatic and powerful. Which was liked however they still thought there were parts which could be cut out to make it more powerful and gritty rather than weak and polite. 

This is our final voiceover which our audience believed was the strongest. We made changes by cutting out parts of the voiceover which made it longer and by doing so made it weaker. Also in this draft we were told just to change words and it would be perfect. 

  

Recording the voiceover

After finding someone to do our voice over for us we needed to find some equipment to record our voice over on.  We began by speaking to our teachers about possible ways to record the voice over, and were originally planning to use the microphone inside the Apple Macs we do all our work on.  However our teachers told us this could not come out as clear as a microphone on its own. Also other ambient sound would be picked up such as the sound of people talking and the sound of the other machines running.

Our teacher gave us a a microphone which you can attach to a camera for increased sound quality. You can see below the microphone and how we used it.