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...