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Perfecting the Audio

    As anyone knows, sound and audio are some of the most important aspects of any film. Sometimes, simply replacing a bad musical score with a good one can turn box office bombs into masterpieces, and since sound is half of what enters the viewer's brain, it is imperative to make it appealing to any watcher. As I was the main editor, I was mainly taking care of adding the sound, and came across many issues while going through the footage that I tried to improve.

    Although our group reviewed the footage in class numerous times and tried to find a good background music piece to place behind the five scenes of our film, we struggled hard at it and had a tough time finding the audio that was just right, so we left that for last. We may go over this more in other posts to our blogs (or may simply leave it be alone).

    Just because we didn't pick out specific musical tracks though doesn't mean we didn't have issues with our soundtrack that we needed to iron out. There were two major issues that I came across:

    Firstly, there was a problem where we ended filming some scenes too abruptly after the acting ended, leaving less legroom for the audio flexibility, especially causing issues with smooth audio transitions to different scenes. Luckily, there were some scenes we were cutting anyway slightly due to space issues, so I was able to maintain ambient noise continuity in those by making sure we had a small piece of sound from the previous scene fade into the next scene's noise.

Editing in Audacity

    However, there was one specific issue with the final scene where I decided to use an image still of the very last frame in order to keep the title on screen for a time long enough to be readable. Since it didn't have corresponding audio, it was troubling trying to make it sound good. There I had to use the program Audacity (which we previously used while making our Sound Story) to create some more manufactured background noise that we could add on. I did this by taking a certain piece of the audio at the very end and repeating it. It took a while to look for the right piece, but after that was done, it sounded natural

How I took care of the transition from the second scene to the third scene

    Moreover, a decision had to be made on what to do with the sound of the conversation in the transition between the second and third scenes (when all the passengers disappear). I chose to use a technique where the audio between the two scenes was crossfaded, and since we had a lot of extra material to work with at the end of the second scene, I just decided to put a piece of that at a low volume during the transition period of the second and third scenes.

    There was one piece of nondiegetic sound that we added, though. That was a shrill horror theme that surfaced right at the end of the video as the title of the film was shown in order to accentuate the main character's mental breakdown and also make the theme of the movie more clear.

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