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.

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

Editing is probably the area in all of this project that I feel the most comfortable and confident, I really enjoy editing and feel like I have a good understanding of what looks good and how I can achieve that. I’m regards to this project, and in my opinion, for horror in general, the editing can make or break it and is in many ways the most important part of creating a good short horror film. For my editing I used colleges edit suite and edited my work on Final Cut Pro, I have edited all bar one project on this software so feel the most confident with it and so felt it would be the safest bet to use it for this project as it is so important. I want my editing to help build up suspense and bring all my footage together in a coherent and interesting way that helps captivate the audience, and in the nightmare sequence (scene 3) I want the editing to be a little more disjointed and, well, dream-like. I plan on doing all of this with strategic cuts and angle changes as well as using the audio and music, which I will write a different blog about, to help built the atmosphere of terror.

I am, so far, around half way through my editing, I have put all the clips together in an order and format I think will work well, and have started by working on making it look cohesive and professional. As well as this, I have also started working on the more stylistic cuts and edits in the nightmare sequence. I wanted to focus on the nightmare sequence first as it is, in a way, it’s own stand alone scene and so doesn’t need to have any continuity to the scene before it or the scene after it, where as the other scenes do have to focus more on the continuity. The nightmare sequence is going to be a lot more disjointed and artistic in comparison to the other 3 scenes and so I wanted to spend a lot more time figuring out what atmosphere I wanted to create with this and how I would create that through editing.

As this blog is only to discuss the beginning of editing, I of course am not able to talk through everything I will do in terms of editing as the more ‘technical’ editing is yet to come. However, there were a few things I have learnt while editing this and a few issues I came across.

First of all, after putting my clips in order, there was one shot I wanted to focus on first as I had a very specific view of how I wanted this to look, this shot is the 2nd into 3rd shot of my short film. In this shot Ella throws her keys onto the bed which happen to have a Satan key ring attached to it, I had the idea of freezing this scene and having the title come on screen over this lil’ devil. This serves as a great shot for the title to come onto as it makes sense with the name of the film, “Satan’s Game”, but is also used to foreshadow the later events and to give the audience the idea that our main character is somehow involved in Satanism from the very begging. I did not know how on Earth, or in hell, to do this as I had never done an edit like this on earlier projects, however the solution was pretty simple. The short cut for this tool is to select the clip and then press Alt and F and this adds in a freeze frame that I could lengthen or shorten to my desire, this tool is also at the bottom of the ‘edit’ tab at the top of the screen while using Final Cut Pro.

Once I had gotten into the editing I realised I wanted to re-film a few clips, which will be another blog, but needed a way to remember what I wanted to film and where I would put it in editing once I had the footage. This is when my friend Ella showed me the ‘placeholders’, these are still clips you can put in to take the place of a non existing clip. I have put quite a few in my edit so far so that I know where I wanted them and what I wanted them to look like by adding little descriptions to the placeholders. This won’t effect my edit at all once it is complete but felt it was worth writing about as it has become really helpful for me and has helped me be able to order my thoughts and what I need to do next.

I haven’t really used many other techniques so far apart from the ‘blade’ tool and shortening and lengthening clips which isn’t too impressive. I will write another blog going more in depth about my editing once I have delved into the more exciting and technical aspects of it but for now this blog was really just to reflect on my first few editing sessions.