March 20, 2019 – A Lot To Learn

me thinking about all the sound editing I have to do

Now the fun part… actually adding in sound! I have zero experience editing sound and don’t know the difference between “good enough” and “really good”. In fact, I’ve been avoiding doing sound this whole time because I don’t have enough confidence in my skills. However, this project is all about learning and I can’t exactly submit a silent title sequence. I decided to tackle editing the ambient sound before adding in my music to get a feel for the world of the film. Chances are the progress I make on ambient sound now will change when I add music.

Creating (Some) Ambient Sounds

In order to edit ambient sound, I need to have ambient sound. My camera did a decent job of recording sound but there were some sounds I wanted to be crisper. To make sure I had all my bases covered, I went back and recorded some foley sounds. Foley can be defined as “the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film, video, and other media in post-production to enhance audio quality.” I only redid the crucial sounds, such as:

Door closing
Door locking
Car pulling into a parking space/driveway
Car door opening
Car door closing
Alarm going off
Breathing/sighing
Grabbing phone off a pile of books

I determined that these were the sounds I needed to rerecord by going through my rough cut and turning up the volume on the clips. Then I listened to it all the way through and made a list of what sounded bad. I decided to use voice memos on my iPhone 8 in order to record these sounds. A few of the sources I consulted said that the iPhone is surprisingly good at recording sound so I’m not nervous about the quality of it. Besides, I have previous experience recording voice memos on iPhone and editing them in iMovie. Examples of my experience are this analysis of Get Out (2017) that I did earlier in the school year and my film pitch (blog post found here).

Get Out analysis

Editing Ambient Sound

sound editing montage

I consulted a few sources in order to learn more about sound editing in iMovie. I learned that the first step to sound mixing is to set your volume to a comfortable level. My sources suggested listening to a song or the first few minutes of a movie first in order to do this. After this step, it was mostly just adjusting the volumes of my clips. I kept each clip at around 30% and 100% volume; some clips were loader than others and had to be turned down, while some were softer than others and had to be turned up. Like I mentioned earlier, I listened to my film with audio and determined what sounds needed to be redone. Then I added them in later and synced them up with the visuals. I’m really pleased with how the sound turned out; see my title sequence with ambient sound below.