Instead of planning my whole audio and soundtrack before editing I decided, other than the audio of my cult members chanting, that because I didn’t know what my audio would consist of until I start editing, I would do my audio panning while editing. I decided to do this so that I could get a feel for how my visuals would look and then decide on the audio from there, this is giving me a better idea of the atmosphere I want to portray through the audio. Although I did not pre-plan any of my audio this doesn’t mean I hadn’t had some great ideas about it beforehand; I have had many ideas about my audio, as I have written about many of them in other blogs, such as “when we all fall asleep…” and Iron Maiden lyrics. I think the music and sounds in a horror films are almost as important to telling the story as the visuals are or as any dialog is, and so I feel I have put a lot of thought into my audio while editing and have managed to intertwine the audio with the visuals in a way to really aid the story. I have filled out an audio planning sheet, shown at the bottom of this blog, however I wanted to talk through my choices of audio in a little more detail throughout this blog.

My own audio: I decided for this short film to use a lot of the natural audio and sounds from my footage such as, the bed creaking, footsteps, the sound the lighter makes etc. This was a conscious decision on my part as I wanted the reality scenes, so every scene other than the nightmare sequence, to feel very realistic and lifelike and I feel that by keeping in much of the natural audio I managed to portray that in my final film. Though there are some shots where the background noise or static is a little much, I still think, overall, the absence of these sounds would be a lot more noticeable than the presence of the sounds.

As well as using the original audio from my clips I also recorded some of my own audio separately, that being the chanting audio we hear in the nightmare sequence. Now, I had originally recorded this while shooting the nightmare sequence but forgot that once I cut up the clips that the audio would become all disjointed too, so I ended up recording it separately. I didn’t use any fancy recording equipment or this, just my same DSLR that I used for filming but isolated the audio from the video in post-production. I also took this audio clip of the chanting and edited it a lot but that is a whole blog on its own, so I will discuss that in more detail, as well as any other audio editing I did, in the next blog or blog after that.

Final Cut Pro sound library: As well as using my own audio for a lot of the natural noises, I did use quite a few sounds from within Final Cut Pro itself. I did this for a few reasons, first, because there is no copyright issues I have to deal with or consider when adding it to my work and secondly, it is just so damn easy. I used a few different sounds from this library, including some ‘gasp’ noises and the sound of a heartbeat through the nightmare sequence. I am really pleased with the effect these sounds had on my film, especially the heartbeat as, by speeding up and slowing down the speed of the heart beat, I got to convey the terror my character was feeling when just the acting on its own didn’t convey these emotions enough.

Music: In terms of music I used, in total, 3 different tracks, but only two of them made it to my final edit. I really wanted to incorporate Billie Eilish’s song “Bury A Friend” in some way as I had done some research into it and felt the idea and topic of the song is extremely fitting for the subject of my film. Of course I knew that in order to use this song I would have to find some kind of cover or remix that wasn’t covered by any copyright laws and that wouldn’t get my video removed or the audio removed from it once uploaded to YouTube. I searched a lot to find some songs that would work and ended up finding a “Horror Orchestra” version of the song that was under the Creative Commons Attribution license and so was completely ok for me to re-use. I have never been more thrilled about an audio track ever in my life, and even though, because of the absence of the lyrics, some may not understand why this song works so well in the context, it still sounds very effective as background music. Of course those that have read through my blogs or know the song very well are more likely to understand the full reason as to why it fits so well in this film and before the nightmare sequence.

The next song I found was where I became a little disheartened, it was a Billie Eilish, “Bury A Friend” remix which sounded incredible in my film as it had the lyrics but was edited in a very creepy and atmospheric way. I ended up creating a version of my short film with this audio in some places of my film, for example I had the line “when we all fall asleep, where do we go” playing as the camera is zooming in to Ella asleep in bed right before the nightmare sequence takes place. Everyone who I showed this to loved it and we all agreed that it was extremely effective and linked so well to the idea of the dream sequence. However, this music didn’t end up making it into the official short film because getting the right copyright permission was going to be nearly impossible as I would have had to get in touch with the original artists and production team. Although I am sure that, because I only used a small amount of the song, I would have been ok to post it on YouTube, I didn’t want to use this song and have it seem as though I wasn’t aware of the copyright issues so instead just replaced this song with a different one for the official short film.

As I just mentioned, I replaced the Billie Eilish remix with a different song for my final short film, this was a track I had saved when I was looking into music for last years FMP and which is “royalty free” and completely free for me to use in my short film. Although not as edgy as the remix which I fell in love with, it did still have a creepy and, in many ways, more sinister feel to it so overall, I think it almost works better in my final short films than the other song would have.

Orchestra Billie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bIgKHnW4EA&list=PL7fusMGA68RaoKOYUuerloUBwVMJ85EHR&index=16&t=0s

Remixed Billie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydOxbr9nips&list=PL7fusMGA68RaoKOYUuerloUBwVMJ85EHR&index=15&t=0s

Creepy final song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O4q4zMBbHQ&list=PL7fusMGA68RaoKOYUuerloUBwVMJ85EHR&index=10&t=68s