Editing Evaluation- Sound- The Scream

Editing Evaluation- Sound- The Scream

TDAC have had much discussion about a certain part of our opening scene and the sound that goes with it. In our film there is a kidnap when the killer emerges from off screen and grabs the unsuspecting victim by covering her mouth. When editing this the footage didn't look quite right so we put the run up to the camera in normal time but then put the kidnap into slow-motion to make it more dramatic which it did, however it still didn't look quite right.

We then decided to play with the sound and put some music in the background. I firstly turned down the contrapuntal music track and then decided to slow it and put a 'large room' effect on which made the music sound eerie and distorted. I put a heavy breathing effect on and also some music which slowly gets louder but there was still something missing because the whole running scene had been building up to this pivotal moment and it didn't really amount to anything.

We tried finding some screams on Youtube that might work but the problem was that in filming, Dave grabbed Tia's mouth first so she wouldn't really have had time to gasp loudly and if she were to scream it would have to sound muffled. With no results in finding a muffled scream on the internet, the group decided to try and record our own using voice recorders on our phones. We tried many different methods to recreate the scream; I tried grabbing Tia's face so it sounded more realistic but it sounded unnatural. She tried screaming into a jumper to make the sound sound like she had a hand over her face but again it wasn't sounding how we wanted. Myself, Charley and Dave all had a go as well but recreating a scream which we weren't quite sure how it would have sounded like if Tia had actually been grabbed.

We decided to submit it as a first draft but the feedback that we got reflected our thoughts exactly. We further discussed sound effects for the kidnap scene but with the footage that we had and without refilming, it wouldn't have looked and sounded realistic and seamless so we opted to leave it as it was. If we were to improve though, we would have rerecorded the scene to make it look as if Tia was struggling a bit more and also would have got her to scream and then we could have used the actual diegetic scream.  


These were some of the videos that we found on YT but didn't think quite worked for our opening: