For this task, I had to add sounds onto a piece of silent film.
To do this effectively, my first task was to watch the silent piece slowly and document what actions the person, or in my instance, cartoon, was doing that would require sound. This helped me to make a plan on what sounds I needed, and also in what order I needed them. I wrote down a list on a piece of paper of what sounds I needed in order and started to plan out how I was going to make these sounds.
Once I had decided on what I needed to make this project successful, I then started to play around with different ways to make sounds thar sounded like what I needed with different resources, for example, I needed to make the sound of a match lighting, for this I simply scraped a pen across the wall to get the same effect. To me, this was the most challenging part of this task. I struggled to think what sounds would be familiar to the ones I needed without actually doing what the cartoon was doing in the film. After great struggle, with the help from one of my tutors, I started to gain material that I could use.
After playing around with the microphone for a while, I then got inducted into the sound booth that could be used to make sounds. My tutor showed me how to record and also how to edit sounds on the computer. I have always been interested in music editing and have had a lot of expreience with this in the past, so being in a booth was a pleasurable experience for me, if not somewhat a sense of reminissance. It was interesting to learn methods that I did not know as we were using a windows computer and I am used to apple.
I carried on recording my sounds and also obtaining sounds of the internet, making sure they were non copyrighted.
After I had finally gotten all of my sounds, I proceded to edit my sounds into my film using Premier pro. I started by finding some old music to put over the top of the whole movie like they used to have in silent movies in the past, I wanted the music to sound like a live band / orchestra could of conducted it as this is what they had when silent movies were popular. I also thought this would hlep to cover any awkward silent gaps within the movie so that the sounds added did not sound out of place or edited in. I then started to add the other sounds in on top, making usre they were perfectly in time with the film. This was challenging at first and took many attemps for me to get it fully right, but after practice I found that I could easliy fit the sound in time.
Seeing as my footage was from a cartoon, I still wanted to keep the cartoon origins in. This meant that I didn't want to just have realisitc sounds in the film. I experiemented with different cartoon sounds that are often used and played around with where would be appropiate to place them. This was extremely challenging at first as they felt out of place due to the mix of realistic and unrealistic sounds, but afte rmany attemps, I managed to find the right sounds and the right places for them.
Overall, I am impressed with the video I have created as this was my first attempt of adding sound to film. I have learned many skills such as how to record and add my own sound and also how to place sound effectively so it sounds natural and part of the film. As well as this, I have learned alot of contextual knowledge, such as the origins of silent movies and the growth of silent movies. Next time that I add sound to a film, I will experiment more with adding cartoon sounds in and focus more on the timing of the cartoon sounds so that it fully fits the film, as I feel like I could have done that better in this example.
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