As I have already mentioned in my audio planning blog, I recorded some of my own audio for the nightmare sequence of my short film. I recorded my ‘cult member’ chanting their script, “the ritual has begun, Satan’s work is done, the sacrifice is being made tonight”, on a loop so I could use it in the nightmare sequence as the main audio. Since this was going to be my main piece of audio for that scene, I didn’t want it to just sound like 3 people chanting in an echoey room, I wanted this piece of audio to sound a lot more sinister and distorted than that. In this blog I will be discussing the editing I did to this clip and any other audio editing I did throughout the post production stages of my work, I will also look at a questionnaire I sent out and what the responses to this were and how/if this affected my decisions in terms of my audio.

Editing: I decided to edit this clip of the chanting in Adobe Audition as this software is specifically for audio editing and I can edit the audio in much more detail here than I can just in Final Cut Pro. I do not have too much experience with this software, other than a few lessons on it at the very beginning of this course, and so made use of the softwares features and audio filters it has to offer. I created 3 different audio files, each with different filters and sounds, I did this because I wanted to give myself, and my audience, options on which sounded the best in the context.

Although each clip sounds different, the editing process for each was ver similar, for all 3 clips I initially went into the ‘effects’ tab at the top and chose ‘special’ then ‘distortion’. Once in the ‘distortion’ tab I clicked on the ‘presets’ down-bar and tried out these different features, I wish I could say I knew what I was doing and what each feature did, but I don’t and I didn’t so I was just going off of how each effect sounded and which ones I personally thought sounded the scariest or most uncomfortable to listen to.

After playing around with these features for a while and seeing what sounded best and how I could edit the audio and just looking round the Audition software and familiarising myself with its different feature, I found the effects rack. The effects rack, from what I could tell, is where it shows all the different effects that have been added to the track and gives you the choice to delete things from here etc. This section too has a ‘presets’ down-bar that I personally found extremely helpful for my editing, I tested out many of these presets such as “Underwater Speech” and “Wide Spooky Echo”, both of which I ended up using for one or more of my edits.

I, for some unknown reason, ended up forgetting to take screenshots of the specific edits I did to each track which is a bit frustrating, however I do have a screenshot of what I did to the first track I edited.

Feedback: Once I was done editing these and had exported them, I first asked some of my peers that were in the editing suite at the time which track they preferred, but then decided this was a great opportunity to engage with my audience and get some more opinions on my work. I put together a short questionnaire consisting of only 3 questions and a link to my google drive where all the audio clips can be found. I made sure to give the people answering the questionnaire a bit of context to the scene so they had more insight as to where the audio was going and what effect it would have on the scene. The 3 questions I asked were quite basic questions but gathered all the necessary information I needed from this questionnaire; they were, “out of these 3 audio tracks, which do you prefer”, “why did you chose the audio track you did”, and “are there any other audio techniques you think may work with the horror genre”. Here is the link to the questionnaire: https://forms.gle/xPTeqJ5oZmSbY99ZA.

The questionnaire has been live now for about a week and a half and has been sent to all my class mates and other media classes through email, as well as my colleagues at work as many of them fit the demographic I am trying to reach, as well through email. I ended up getting over 25 responses, which I am very happy with for such a small questionnaire. Although I was pretty set on which audio track I personally preferred, track no.3, for this scene, I was still hoping for some other opinions on which was best and, more importantly, why they chose their favourite. Thankfully, the majority chose audio track 3 and so I was very pleased to be able to use the track I felt was the most fitting. The reasons as to why people chose this track varied from “just sounds the best” to “it sounded extremely sinister and I think sounds very identifiable to the genre of your short film”, here is a screenshot of some of the responses to this question as well as a few individual responses:

In my last question, I asked if there were any other audio techniques or sounds I could add to this sequence to make it sound more sinister and that would work within the horror genre. I was expecting the majority of responses to be suggestions like screams, or laughs etc, and although I did get a lot of responses like this, I also got a surprising amount of responses saying not too add anything else to it. Below is a screenshot of a few of these responses:

I am personally very glad I sent out this questionnaire as I feel it really helped me when finalising the audio for my work not to over do it, I did end up adding some distortions such as reversed audio of  glass shattering and a few reversed clips from the chanting, which I will talk about more in my final editing blog, but other than that I tried to take the responses into consideration and not over do the audio for this clip.