Sound Effect Summary

We have had to get creative with our sounds. We used YouTube to find sound effects that we liked, then experimented with ways to remake them ourselves. Some of these were easy, but some weren't so much.

1. Running Water: my sink turned on
2. Transition Sound: ripping a sheet of paper
1. Based off of the Dawn of the Dead title transitions. 
3. Flatline Sound: Anne Marie's car put into reverse
4. Door creak: an actual creaky door
5. Scream: courtesy of NAT

The flatline sound was probably the most random sound effect we had to come up with. I was literally laying in bed last night at about 9:30 and had a lightbulb moment, which I immediately sent into our group chat. My boyfriend has a golf cart, and it makes a drawn out, high pitched noise when you shift it into reverse. It is almost identical to how an actual medical flatline sounds, and it's super easy to get. So that was the first idea. But, his golf cart is broken, so I couldn't get it. Then, Anne Marie remembered that her car makes a similar sound when it is put into reverse. So, the sound is now derived from that. It is kind of faint, so I had to turn it up to like, 300% but it works!

The water running was probably the easiest sound effect to record. I literally walked into my bathroom, turned my sink on, and hit record. The only reason we did this was because the sound of the water running on the actual video clips sounded weird, and because the sound isn't as loud and it kind of echoed, and  on the clip you can hear some talking in the background. Due to us recording just the audio clip, however, we were able to place the clip in all of the areas we needed without worrying about if the volume of two different clips matching up and what not.

The sound I am most proud of is the transition sound. The ripping sheet of paper was so simple, and the sound turned out to have great quality and sounded super cool. We put it at the beginning of every transition in the opening, and it just adds that extra startling nature to the sequence.

Post-Break Recap

So over spring break, in addition to the stuff mentioned in my last post, Nat was able to add some flash-forward inserts in order to allude to the murder. Meaning, in the beginning, there are jump cuts to post-murder shots, to set more of an eerie tone and to get the audience involved with what is going to happen. We also added some time stamps while we were in class, in order to make the time difference more apparent. We are still working on certain sounds, but we were able to record and insert things like water running, and ripping paper for transition sound effects.

For the sound effects, I have learned that even if it sounds really quiet when you first record it, once you put it on iMovie you can really adjust it to the volume you need. For example, the water running that I recorded was fairly quiet, but once we uploaded it we were able to adjust the volume to where you could hear it over the music, but it wasn't overly loud. The main reason the sound wasn't very loud to begin with was because it was recorded using the Voice Memos app that comes on every iPhone. This app is really useful, but it doesn't have the volume aspect that we originally needed, due to the location of the microphone on my phone. To get sounds, we have to make sure the microphone is as close as possible to what we need to record. I learned this app is actually fairly useful, and I will probably be utilizing it in my CCR if I need to use voiceovers at some points.

Something we need to work on is making our actual title slide more prominent. Meaning, we need to make sure that it is differentiated from the rest of the credits. We could try downloading another font, or change the color. Changing the color would probably be the easiest route, but may not achieve the level of differentiation that we need.

**update: I ended up changing both the font AND the color.**

Our Font

Processing

Today, my mission was mainly sound. I was able to use a converter website in order to get the music from the video to an MP3 file, and then downloaded to the desktop. This wasn’t too hard to do, the hardest thing was finding a free website that I could use. Once I accomplished that, all I had to do was copy and paste the YouTube link, then hit “download”. After that, the file was converted to the MP3 file and downloaded to the desktop, where I could then drag it into iMovie and insert it into the project.

Once I had it inserted, I had to shorten the song so that it fit the length of the clip only. So, I just cropped the song, which was pretty simple. But, this resulted in a really rough and abrupt ending to the song, which was off putting. I knew that I had to fade the clip out, but I really didn’t know how. Therefore, I had to go online and find a video on how to fade out. To watch, click here. The consequence of doing that was the music flowed better, and made the sound overall more pleasing.

On a different note not relating to sound, scary fonts are hard to find. The generic fonts that come on computers are... generic. So, I used the website Urban Fonts to find an appropriate horror film font, and I had to download it to the desktop. I thought it was going to be easy, but I had to legitimately download the font 3 times before it saved to the computer, and was available for use. But, it was worth the process because the mood completely changed.  The picture to the left shows the font in the small screen in the right corner.

Source Links:

https://macmost.com/fade-out-background-music-in-imovie.html

Cutting it Up

So yesterday we learned from a fellow classmate how to transfer videos from YouTube to iMovie for  the project. For our film pitch project (see earlier post) we pitched our movie idea to Blumhouse Production Company. Because of that, we wanted to have the Blumhouse opening/logo in the beginning of our film. So the big project was getting the video converted to the project. We had to copy the link of the video to a YouTube converter, and convert it to an Mp4, then download in to the computer. That is the basic shortened version of what we did, and we are going to give credit to Blumhouse in the title sequence. The purpose of doing this is to make the opening more authentic seeming, because it will be just like a big-time movie opening. In addition, the Blumhouse opening is horror-themed, so it helps to set the mood for our project-- see below.

This skill will also be beneficial to use when we have to get music onto our iMovie from YouTube. Although the actual sound effects we have will be original, we need the music for the background sound for the entirety of the introduction. This music, like the logo, will help to set a mood/tone for the project. We spent a lot of the class period yesterday browsing through possible soundtracks on YouTube, and only found two so far that are possibilities. That is something that we will be focusing on a lot more over spring break.

Sound Creation

I mentioned sound in my last post, and how we are still working on it and we are still trying to figure out how to even make the sounds. We were shown this video in class, and honestly it has become one of my favorite videos ever. And, when I went on YouTube and searched "how to make movie sounds", this was still one of the first videos that popped up, probably due to how informational it is.

This shows the ultimate science behind making sounds, and the creativity surrounding the making of them. This provides some good ideas on how to make sounds that are close to what we need. Also, it helps to help us embrace our own creativity to make our sounds realistic and good quality. Sounds will be the main focus over spring break, because we will have the time to record them and everything. Right now, we have hardly any sound in our project, as we have been focusing on things like transitions and color correction. We have gotten most of our credits down, and chose to go the route of using a filter to change our coloring.

Relentless Curveballs

Well, we were using a MacBook Pro for our project from one of our school computer carts, but that sparked some issues. We were not aware at the time that some of the classes we share the cart with have so many kids in the classes that they need every computer in the cart, so we had to save our project elsewhere and return the computer. So, Nat brought her computer in and we tried making that work. She has an older version MacBook, and an older version iMovie also. After transferring the clips, we found that it would be more efficient to use one of the "crappy" computers that our teacher has in his room. The good things about that is that we have a computer that will for sure be available every day in class, and unlike Nat's it has the better version of iMovie, which will allow us to put in more of the effects that we want.

Another curveball that I was thinking about earlier was that next week we have spring break. Which means we will have to see about taking the computer to one of our houses that way we can work on it over the week-long break. We still have quite a bit to do at this point, so we cannot afford to just take a week off. Most of our transitions are finished, and I believe we have one more clip to reshoot. Color correction is done, and we have to really crack down on getting our sounds done. Anyways, it is going to be pretty hard probably to coordinate all of us being available over break to work on it together-- I know for sure that I will be working full-time over break, with most likely only one day off, which I will not be doing anything on besides sleeping because it is supposed to be a "break" after all. Either way, I am pretty positive that we will figure something out.

Current representation of us right now. 

Who ACTUALLY Likes Technology?

Okay, the title is pretty rhetorical because almost everyone likes technology to a certain extent. But, when technology hates you and gives you problems, then it sucks.

The more "blown out" take of the clip
versus the focused one. 

We ended up videoing the clips on my iPhone 7. This worked out pretty good, the quality is not absolutely amazing, but it is still decent. I think the most difficult part was making sure that the camera stayed steady. I have learned over the course of having this phone that it is easily susceptible to shaking-- you have to keep your hands pretty steady. But, we were able to do that for the most part. There were only a few clips that we ended up having to reshoot because the filming was unsteady. Another problem I kind of had when I was videoing a couple of clips was having the camera focus on what I needed it to so that the light didn't wash everything out. I had to figure out where to focus the camera to achieve optimum lighting, which took a few shots.


This was completely our fault, but when we were shooting the other day, we were about 1/4 of the way through shooting when we realized we were not shooting in landscape. It would have been really helpful if we would have had a reminder or something so we remembered. Maybe we are all just a little stereotypical blonde on the inside, though.

Today, we spent an entire class period trying to import the videos from my iPhone 7 to the computer. Or should I say, computerS. We started out trying to import them to a MacBook Pro and save them to the desktop, but it was an older version of the computer so it did not work. So, we tried to just import the clips into iMovie. This kind of worked, except for the fact that they all imported as BLACK CLIPS. Which obviously is not helpful. Therefore, our next step was to try a MacBook Air. Again, it didn't work with just importing the photos. Needless to say, we ended up Airdropping the clips from my phone to the computer, then saving them to Anne Marie's Google Drive. We then saved them to a flash drive, and we plan to back everything up on the flash drive regularly in order to make sure everything stays saved and we do not lose anything.

SETting Up

Hanging up the towel.

We had a lot to do before we even started filming today. To begin, we had to make sure everything was where it should be— meaning, we had to make sure all of the stuff in the bathroom was arranged to how we wanted it. We also had to put a towel over Nat’s bathroom window, because we ended up filming around 11:00 a.m. The reason for this was that we wanted to make sure that we had the bathroom as dark as possible, along with the hallway. We made sure to close all of the bedroom doors in the hallway, so the light did not flood in.

Mixing everything together for
 the blood mixture.

Making our blood was a whole other adventure. We could not find any at stores like Walmart, and we did not have the time to order any online. So, we made our own. We started off with trying to dilute paint with water, but it was too runny. So we then tried adding honey AND glue AND flower to that same mix in order to thicken it, but it didn’t work. What we ended up doing was getting some honey in a little dish, and mixing red and black paint into it for the color. This worked really well for us, especially considering that we made it in probably under 20 minutes. We had to make about three different batches, however, because we kept running out. In all honesty, making the blood was probably the most challenging part of everything today.

Costuming for today was overall interesting. I forgot to bring my robe, so we found one at Nat’s house so that I looked like I was at home getting ready for bed. Finding stuff for Anne Marie was a whole other story, because we wanted her to look unidentifiable and kind of scary. We had to dig around trying to find a black sweatshirt, and then Nat remembered that she had ski masks from her ski trip, so we had to run around trying to find those. So, we were able to fulfill our scary killer costume, that was almost stereotypical. Nat literally just wore the clothes that she wore to school, although it could be seen as ironic that murder=blood, which is red, and her shirt was red ;)

The bathroom before shooting. 

The hardest part I think with continuity of our props was the door, and how open it was. We had it cracked open, but we had to keep going in and out. So, we had to kind of estimate again and again how far open it should be. But it was not that huge of a problem. Thinking now, we probably should have knocked over or displaced some of the items on the counter post-me getting murdered and falling to the ground. We will probably just try to see how it looks, and if worst comes to worst we can just try to reshoot and redo it.

The bathroom before and after blocking the light with the towel.