Recording my Sound

Unfortunately due to the really annoying background noise the camera picked up whilst filming I had to re-record my actors and actresses voices. But to my delight this wasn't actually as hard as I thought it would be, as all I really had to do was to put the camera closer to their mouths, get them to say their lines over a few times and then I could upload the footage, extract the audio and put it over their mouths moving trying very hard to lip sync it in.

I decided not to have a voice-over, even though it is quite conventional of Film Noir, as I wanted a lot of silence in my OTS, creating tension, and I also wanted the storyline to stay mysterious, and not for the ''narrator'' to give it away.

When it came to recording the music, I wanted to create this old gritty sound, as I have used an old record player in the flm that the song was supposed to have been played off. A friend had bought in an ecko radio(photo on the right), which had been converted to be able to play when an ipod or cable is plugged into it, to record my song off of it to give old aged sound that my Film Noir needed. I put the CD (Nowhere Boy Soundtrack) into the computer and then played it through the radio and then recorded it on the video camera.

To produce the dramatic and harsh sounding bang of the gun I wasn't sure whether to download a gun sound from the internet or make the noise myself. If I were to make the noise myself this would be called foleying which is a term that is the process of live recording of sound effects that are created with normal, everyday, anything objects. They are added in post production to enhance the quality of audio for films, television, video, video games and radio. "Foley" gets its name from Jack Donovan Foley (1891-1967), a sound editor at Universal Studios in the 1950s who became famous for his advancements in synchronized sound effects.

I researched foley sounds on the internet and found various websites that tells you how to make a noise that sounds like a gun firing, e.g- a heavy staple gun and a other metal parts make a good gun sound and if you slap a piece of plywood a little smaller than a baseball bat smartly against another piece of solid wood yields an acceptable bang etc. I tried banging various things together but nothing sounded good enough, as there was no bellowing echoes of the sharp sound.

My next idea was to download a gun noise from the internet on one of the many sound effects sites. I found this website - http://www.findsounds.com/ (Can find it in my useful websites, down the side of my blog). This website proved good as you could type in anything you could possibly think of and then loads of options would come up. I decided against this in the end because I found it hard to find a sound I liked...

Until...

A friend brought in a gun that she had bought as it had a distinct sound of a gun firing. It was a perfect sound and just what I wanted, not too clear with just the right amount of echo and reverberation. Below is a photo of the actual gun, not what you would exactly expect as the colour is a bit bright, but makes a good noise nonetheless.

(all sound which has been added is non-diegetic, with the exception being the speech, as normally it would be what is used whilst filming the scene, but I used re-recorded sound, so I would call this implied diegetic)