First Cut

Teacher Feedback

After finishing the first draft of my trailer, I asked my teacher to take a look and give me feedback. She told me that there were a few improvements that I could make.

•  She said that it was unclear whether or not my piece was a trailer or not, she suggested putting in a voice over to make this more clear
• I needed more text such as the actors' names etc
• The scene in the kitchen needed more clarity because it seemed unprofessional in comparison to the rest of the trailer

Fixing the end!

The only thing now left to do in terms of sound, is fixing the end of the sound to fade out rather than just cut out at an awkward time. To do this, I had to take the sound from the climax before the 'COMING SOON' and repeat it at the end. To do this, I split the sound at the climaxed part and then copied and pasted it to the end of the trailer.

I then took another section of the music in the same way and to fade the climaxed bit into, so that the music didn't cut out too abruptly. 

The last thing that I needed to do was fade out the end completely into silence. I accidentally went about this the long way, but still came out with the same result. To do this I took the second section that I pasted and muted the sound completely, I then dragged it over (faded it into) the climaxed bit before. 

The silenced bit, although at the opposite extreme, still made the trailer cut out too abruptly. Therefore, I very slightly increased the decibels one more time to get the effect that I wanted. 

This proved successful in getting the fading out that I wanted at the end.

Making the sound fit better

With the recent addition of the second soundtrack, the transition between having both the soundtracks playing and just having the original main soundtrack playing creates a sort of build up. This build up os so close to the 'COMING SOON' text appearing that it would be wrong not to make it fit perfectly. I moved the text section slightly to make this happen.

Creepy (Second soundtrack)

By this point I feel as though I have done enough with my sound. Now it is time to add in extra things to add to the generic conventions, and scary atmosphere of the trailer. I watched my trailer a few times through, and concluded that the end part of my trailer lacked a certain creepy quality, and what could be creepier than a little nursery rhyme tune playing over the main soundtrack to the visual of the two little girls playing with each other? Not very much could. 

I went about this the same way that I did with the bell noise; by searching copyright free sounds. I found most of these sounds needed to be paid for. This was the one page that I found with free sounds. Even on this page, most of the sounds would have come up as copyrighted because they were existing songs/rhymes.

Therefore, I had a limited choice, and in the end went for the tune 'Haunted Nursery'. This was actually quite fitting, hence the word haunted.

I added this sound into the last section of my trailer, where the girls are playing together, and before the 'COMING SOON' text appears on screen. Quite luckily, this fitted very well without any severe modifications and even gave me inspiration to play with sound even more..

Sound improvement

There is only really one part of the trailer where the actors engage in dialogue. This is the scene where the scary girl appears at the window and the normal girl is trying to get her mum to see her. The shot right before this scene consists of a little bit of dialogue too, but due to the camera position, the dialogue in this part is a lot quieter than the following scene. This makes my trailer look less professional and so I tried to fix the issue.

Before I was able to do this I had to split the shot with the quiet dialogue, because the only sound that needs to be increased is the dialogue. For example, if I were to increase the whole sound of the shot the sound when the girl is coming down the stairs will be very loud. 

After this was done, I selected the split scene and increased the decibels from 0.0 dB to 8.8 dB. I decided to go to extremes (8.8 dB) first, and work back from there because I knew that I would need to increase the sound a fair amount to begin with.

This made a noticeable improvement to the sound in this part of the trailer, and so I didn't increase the sound any further.

Purifying the sound

Because some of the sounds are less identifiable with the music on top, such as the alarm clock sound, I will need to either make them sound more clear, or add in non-copyrighted sounds over the top. I chose to add in the non-copyrighted sound because it would show my skills with the software better.

This is how I went about this:

I then downloaded this sound because it sounded the most how I pictured the alarm clock bell to sound. This original sound only had one 'ding' so I had to copy and paste it 4 times so that the bell would sound 5 times in my trailer in synchronization with the actor's fingers. I had to fade the last two because the actress is irregular with her movements and I wanted the sounds to fit her actions perfectly.