T-15 FILM EXTRACT: Rachel's evaluation

Monday, 2 March 2009

Rachel's evaluation

The genre for sequence was neo-noir and we wanted the sound used to create an atmosphere and suspense. The sound throughout our sequence is a calm melody. To begin with we wanted a calm melody leading into a tension buliding melody. I looked at the fight scene in Twilight for this because they use tension buliding music at the beginning of the scene which then flows into a calmer melody. This helped me to understand how to combine the different melodies for our sequence,

However after quicktiming it and watching it back we felt that the tension melody was too much se we decided to carry on with the calmness till the end, which I made combineing two different melodies. This fitted much better.

When it was time to choose the music used we all had our say in it because we all took into consideration what everybody wanted and thought. It was hard trying to find a piece of music that fitted well, so in the end I chose two pieces and combined them, which I felt worked really well. When the Protaginist is getting 'lectured' by the teacher we did orginally record the depty head teacher but twhen we uploaded the sound onto the computer it was too quiet and we couldn't make it louder, so we asked her to record it again but when we uploaded it, it hadn't recorded, so instead of asking her a 3rd time we asked our cinematographer, Ram Kaur, to record herself saying the 'potential speech' because she said it clearer than the rest of us. When James walks out of the room and carries on walking down the corrider, we have Ram's voice carrying on talking over the top, but it gets quieter then picks back up again because we wanted it to give the impression that he has had enough and has other important things on his mind, so he blurs her out, its almost as if he is in a daydream. Although first-person narration was a popular device among the writers, it put the viewer into the mind of the protagonist in that way the viewer could experience in a more intimate way the angst of the character. I felt that this still worked successfully because you can tell that the character has had enough, by his body language and that the voice over keeps blurring out. I was specifically pleased with the part where James is outside and walking and he can hear footsteps behind him, the sound of heels. We filmed this part by holding the camera at foot level and the person holding the camera was wearing the heels and so when it came to edit the sound this part was very simple to do because the cameras microphone picked the sound up of the heels very well. For this part we looked at the scene from 'Brick' where Brendon is running away from some guy with a knife, this was very helpful for me.

I was also really pleased with the music we used, because although we wanted a sound which would create a bulided up tension, the calm melody I chose, I felt worked really well because it still gives an eerie effect to the sequence because you don't know what is going on so there is always the suspense effect. There is a huge importance of sound in the cinema because it helps generate responses in the audience. For example, if the music is happy, then the audience will feel more settled, to music that is slowly building up becasue the audience expect something bad/scary to happen. I felt that in the end our sequences was successful, however I would probably change the ending, so y0u can actually hear a gun-shot sound instead of just guessing what happened to him, because when other people were viewing our sequence they were slightly confused about what happened to the 'Protaganist' because there was no gun-shot sound, but all in all I am pleased with how the sound on our sequence turned out.

Labels: Evaluation, Rachel Fordham, Sound editing

posted by AS Film Studies Students @ 14:01

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