construction part 3 - adding sound

With the completed edited teaser, my next step was to add sound. Namely, the narrative driving voice over and the epic music that corresponds with the shown footage, in accordance with the established codes and conventions. This was perhaps the hardest of the construction tasks for me, as due to the rules of the project we had a very restricted range of ways to get our hands on music. Suffice to say, we were not allowed to use any ‘copyrighted’ music (even though EVERYONE on near enough any site does already) without written permission from the artist or composer, which realistically isn’t going to happen for a school project. Therefore, any music we did use had to be either in the imovie music clip library or created by ourselves through an external program such as garageband. Now, not being very knowledgeable in musical creation methods, this was a real problem for me. For my trailer to be as effective as possible its was of the utmost importance that the sound matched and fitted in with the kind of image i was trying to convey with me teaser. So, after hours and hours of tedious searching, I settled on an imovie sound clip entitled ‘Shetlands’, a stereotypical Scottish track with loads of strings and wind instruments and annoyingly, bag pipes. Don’t get me wrong, I love bag pipes, but for my teaser it just wouldn’t fit. Hence a lot of editing and rapid learning whilst going through roughly 2 minutes of music to find parts that both blend together well and are bag pipe free. I had to identify portions of the music that would not only go with the footage but with each other. I settled with a stern opening piece from the beginning of the song because it naturally had no bagpipes. then i used a segemnt from the end that was set between the rest of the song and a final bout of bag piping, which was very mysterious and fitted well with both the footage and the beginning segment. I then lastly editited the two segments, moulding them to a point were they blended seamlessly together and worked together with my footage.

The voice over was also hard, mainly because I had no confidence with my own voice. I sought many alternatives, including that of a teacher’s, but in the end I settled on a gruffer (?) version of my own voice. I designed the script to reflect the kind of mystical overtones of my teaser, whilst throwing in a quote from ‘braveheart’ for a number of reasons, which are: it implies that this is the scene of a battlefield and that this is a one of the fighters, and as it’s a reference to a well known and popular movie it carries with it the connotation that this is a similar movie and just as good. Once my music and narrative voice over was done, I decided not to add anymore, to say random, sound effects. Why? Because firstly I believe that as an entire construct, the teaser works very well as is and that no further sounds are required (really, where could I add anymore? You’ll see what I mean in the final product), and secondly the sound effects on imovie and even garageband to some extent rubbish. Despite this however i feel that the music and voice over that i did achieve turned out great.