Sound Scape

Since my research into sound featured within thriller films, I have begin giving consideration to the soundscape of our group's piece. A Soundscape is a very important aspect of a film, especially within the thriller and horror genres. As part of our group's research into sound, I have been looking into the possible avenues of royalty free samples to guarantee us the right type of sound for our thriller opening. I have browsed through pre-recorded diagetic sounds to place into our thriller during the last unsupervised lesson.

"Sound is 50 per cent of the motion picture experience" - George Lucas.

Though we might think of film as an essentially visual experience, the importance of film sound cannot be underestimated. The entire sound track is comprised of three essential ingredients:  

• the human voice (Dialogue) 

• sound effects (Ambience and Effects) 

• music (Soundtrack, Score)

These three tracks must be mixed and balanced in order to produce the necessary emphasis on effects and to create a desired audience response. These comprise to form the Soundscape. They are analogous to elements in the real world.

I have looked into various websites such as SoundJay and Sounddogs. I found both of these sites very useful, when searching for free audio. Here are just some of the sound effects we have considered:

'heartbeat' effect - This can be layered on top of the running scene during the beginning and at the ending of the opening when this scene is repeated, to realistically emphasize the character's emotions.

Cafe noise - Adding to the background scenery during the shots. Because the dialogue will be imported, we therefore need to essentially build our soundscape back up, so creating realistic cafe noise is a must. This is something we may also record ourselves instead of simply sampling it. 

'Eerie Atmospherics' - Providing a transition between the flashback sequences and the 'real-time' as the Witness narrates the story. This is something I am going to look into further because it is important we harness the right sort of music. I.e. Too over-the-top  could quite easily be mistaken as horror music which is not in keeping with our genre. 

A screenshot of one of the Sound archives I have been looking in to.