Sound In Films

Sound is a major part in movies, but we hardly notice it because it can sound so natural and flows with the scene well.

I decided to look at different scenes in some genres and see the difference in the sounds in those scenes. For instance, I firstly looked at this scene in the live action Hercules where there's a lot of chaos and drama. Here there's loads of detail in audio - such as marching, fire crackling, screaming, rocks breaking and even a dramatic soundtrack. I compared this to a comedy genre film, Grown Ups, and here there is still detail, like cheering and water splashes, but there is no soundtrack and a lot more dialogue.

A technique of sound production is foley, and this is where sound effects are recorded separately to the actual film. Here's a video on YouTube, showing you how Foley works:

The group I made a short silent film decided to record certain sounds over the top of the footage. Then, we did separate edits of our final piece using Abode Premier Pro. Below you can see a screenshot of the video in working progress, but we used sounds such as clapping, footsteps, banging, knocking and recorded them, and then placed them into the video.

We didn't do any dialogue in the film, and, unfortunately, I couldn't manage to add a soundtrack (and, if I'm honest, I had no clue what soundtrack to add anyway). But I'm happy with my first attempt at sound in films, and - I can only hope - I'll get way way way better.