Sound Design | Workshop

As a part of our editing and sound workshop we were given the task to add clips of audio onto a 3 minute clip which is muted from the original audio. Within the task we were supposed to find sound effects online that we thought would suit the shots in the clip and put them together in a sequence in order to create a certain tone.

 

I worked with Laura in this workshop and we decided that we were going to retrieve sound effects from YouTube and a sound effects website called 'Free SFX'. I have used the 'Free SFX' website for other past projects, including 'The Meeting' and I have found it to be quite useful. We found some sounds from this website, but we had the most success in finding what we wanted on YouTube. We found it quite difficult finding pieces of audio that we liked and that we thought suited the scenes, but once we had found what we wanted we were happy with the end result.

 

We wanted the scene to be quite intense and build up in tension and dynamics. We came up with the idea of adding a heartbeat and progressively have it getting faster throughout the clip. When this was added it gave the clip some mystery and definitely made it feel intense. Another audio clip we used to get this effect was the sound of footsteps along both pavement and grass. This helped as it would show someone getting closer to their destination or show someone creeping up behind someone else making the scene nerve-racking.

 

My favourite sound effects that we used were the ambience sounds. We had one when we see the cars on the street, one in the park of the children and families, and one in the park of a wood/forest sound with birds chirping and wind. These helped to create a sense of the atmosphere and environment the characters are in. It also added to the tension as they were cut quite close to each other which we liked. We used some silence in the clip as well to add to the tension and to show that something bad might happen.

 

I really liked this workshop as we got the freedom to change up the sound design and we got the chance to experiment with different sounds.