Editing Notes for Music and Sound

The main focus of this post is to justify the sound and music we’ve chosen for our Film Noir Opening piece. We’ve chosen a really soft, downbeat piece of music that still has quite a dark quality for the titles that sound-bridges into the first scene. This, in my opinion, creates an effective juxtaposition of sorts between the heavy, electronic, upbeat music used for the flashbacks that people won't expect. I used a royalty free sample courtesy of Apple. I added; a bitcrusher, distortion, reverb and an echo to create a really nasty sinister tone to it whilst keeping that really tragic kind of melody it has. In my opinion, it does sound really noir, but updated, which is essentially the key to our entire piece of work.

Next, we have the voice-overs. The reason we collectively decided to include a voice over is because we felt that the audience may be slightly confused and needed some insight into the character’s mind. I think the way it turned out is really effective. It compliments the scene, clarifies what’s happening, sets the audience up for the flashbacks and improves their relationship with the character. The voice-over of the girl is one of my favourites though, and the way it’s edited, in my opinion is really effective. We applied heavy reverb to her voice and added delay and a really eerie echo which is not only frighteningly ghostly, but makes the audience wonder why the male character is hearing this and makes them question his innocence.

Finally, the music we used for the flashbacks, is a piece by an artist named Peaches. The music had a very grimy, seedy electro feel to it and we liked that it had very subtly appropriate lyrics. The line; “seems you got a little bit more than you asked for” also builds the sequence up and builds suspension and awe, things we definitely wanted to create in this opening body of work. Unfortunately, the music, named ‘More’, we used for the flashback sequences is not royalty-free so we will have to research how to propose to XL Recordings/Kitty-Yo, the owners of the song, for permission to use the material, organise to pay royalties, etc.

By Ben Halliday, by Group Editor