Sound: Foley, Voice Overs, and More

          One of the most challenging parts of the project as a whole is going to be editing all of my Foley sounds in post production. I briefly mentioned this before, but I wanted to go more in depth with it now. Since the endangerment of the first shots I knew that I was going to have to mute my production and start with the sound from scratch. There was too much unconnected noise in the background to make sense of the scenes without doing so, and there's very minimal synchronous speaking in any of the shots, so I figured that this would be the best process to create my full atmosphere.

          The way I began with this, in the realist portions, was going back to the spots that I filmed and recording the ambiance of the room in pure "silence". The only thing diagetic to the ambiance was the sound of the fan whirring, which was easy to recreate. As for the formalist shots, there is actually a shooting range at Markham Park next to the spot that we filmed. Keeping dead silent for minutes, I recorded the ambiance of the forest with the gun shots in the background and I'm planning on using this as the basis for he background of the episode. Of course, I will also include the sounds of footsteps, clothes brushing against each other, breathing, door knobs turning, and any other sound that are diagetic to the scenes. The realist scenes will mainly use synchronous sounds, but the formalist region reflecting the episode will contain but more asynchronous and non-diagetic sounds.

          Also in the episode (I've been waiting for the right moment to discuss this!) is going to be voice overs of Teresa's voice and potentially the voices of others that are going to scream and taunt Michael in his episode so as to reinforce and reflect the main themes of the film. In truth, this film is an commentary of the plight of soldiers in society during and after the war. My primary themes include the loss of innocence, the brutality of war, the false definition of what constitutes "being a man",  and more controversial issues. Below is a rough script of what I am going to record Amanda saying and how she is going to say it, and I'm going to match the tone of the voice over to overlay with the tone of the snippets on the screen. By the end of the episode, when Michael lashes out and "accidentally" hits Teresa, the sound is going to have built up to and intolerable and complex auditory experience, leading up to the final blow (when all sound will stop). The only thing that will be consistent from beginning to end is a faint ear ringing sound, similar to what someone with tinnitus hears, to enhance loneliness in the realist scenes and disjointed-ness in the formalist scene.