Sound Person's Journal

Sound team: Jaspreet Hanspal, Ahmed Khan, Sahir Ahmed


Jaspreet's Sound Person Journal:
My findings from contributing to sound has been a learning curve for me, as I have discovered how crucial sound effects can prove to be in improving the quality of your work, and how vital it is to have naturalistic sound to create ambiance and atmosphere, and make the video more realistic as a whole.
Finding the sound effects was difficult as it was hard to find a suitable/realistic sound effect to match actions such as footsteps, heartbeat, and the door opening and closing. We also had to find an iconic tune to include in our video, as this is a marketing strategy I wanted to include as Director. At last we found our sound on YouTube, and decided to use a file named 'scary music' which sounded like the 'harry potter' theme tune. however we thought this suited best, as it sounds like a trinket box playing, which corresponds with the age of the little girl, hinting to the viewer the film is going to be about this little child, creating an enigma.
We used programmes such as SoundCut Pro, Clip-art (on word), Youtube and Soundcloud to find our music. We mainly used SoundCut Pro and YouTube, as it was easy to transport the files onto our film, and we used Media Converter (mediaconverter.net) to convert the video file from youtube to an audio file for our production.
Despite finding all the sounds, some worked and some did not. So I had to go and find new sounds with my team, and add them to the production. At the last minute we had to make changes, with feedback from the post-questionnaire I conducted. We eliminated the 'crying' sound for the catchy scary theme tune, as we wanted to create recognition for the little girl, and create suspense for the audience. We also included the heartbeat to also create intensity. In the end, I think the sound has really heightened the quality of my film, and I believe it has definitely improved from the 1st draft successfully, I am very happy with the results!


Sahir's Sound Person Journal:


Being part of the sound crew for our production, has provided me with key skills which I may be able to use in the future for my own advantage. Being part of the sound crew meant that I, along with my other group members, had to find appropriate sounds for our thriller, which would be appropriate, sound effective and sync in with our film. We all found suitable sounds and sampled them with our video and came to a group decision on which ones we should choose. The two main resources we used to find our sounds were Soundcut Pro and YouTube. I made sure that the sounds I used did not have any copyright issues related to them, and this was not a problem with sound cut pro, as all the sounds on there are default sounds already imported into the sofwares' data. I had to make sure that when I was looking for sounds, they did not sound too unrealistic as this would make less like a Horror/Thriller. I found alot of sounds, however many of them did not fit into the guidelines we set out for our sounds to have, therefore I had to scrap alot of them, and proceed with a selected few. We did not find sounds for the effect of Ahmed's footsteps, therefore I came up with the idea of going out and recording certain sounds to make our sound searching alot easier. Hence, later on, Jaspreet did the same with Ahmed after realising how convenient that would be. Our film was a film which needed to put the viewers in suspense, therefore we needed to find a theme tune which effectively went with our story line. Jaspreet and Ahmed found a great theme tune, which was somewhat like the Harry Potter tune, and decided to use it as our opening theme tune. I had a listen to the tune, and acknowledged Jaspreet and Ahmed on their great sound finding skills. All in all, being part of the sound crew had made me a more all round cameraman and media group member, and has given me key skills which I would be happy to use in the future, and would enable me to fit into a film-making cast/crew much more easily.