Sound and Sound Effects Research

There are three purpose's to why sound effects are added to films.

1. Simulating reality to the audience.
2. To create an illusion.
3. To set the mood of the scene or type of film to the audience.

Creating reality to the audience allows objects to become real and make scenes that are set up seem real. For example, in film's props are often fake but given the right sound effect to match when filming, it appears to the audience that it is real. An example of a film that uses this is The Grinch, He smashes a fake bottle and eats it. It appears real because the actual sound of a real bottle smashing that has been imported added at the same time of the actor doing the action makes it real. Click here to watch the scene

Sound creates illusion to the audience because it allows the audience to hear what is happening even if they don't see it. An illusion often created is the sound of someone opening the door shutting it off camera then the character walking on to the scene. The sound effects of a car driving and parking, a door shutting, keys jangling, footsteps and the sound of a door opening and shutting creates the illusion to the audience that someone has drove their car onto the drive, parked up and walked into the room where they are filming without the need of proof of actually seeing this with their own eyes.

Sound is also used to set the scene, this is usually used in Horror or Thriller type films which creates suspense to the audience as the music makes them tense as they are aware the dark music is going to lead to something bad happening. The famous film using this successfully is Jaws. They could be shooting an innocent scene in the water, such as children playing ball games in the water, once the famous theme tune plays, the audience instantly know that the shark is coming and about to attack which effects the audience, this is unrestricted range which creates alot of tension because the audience know that there is going to be an attack but the characters are completely unaware of it.

We are going to add synchronous sound effects to our film to make them more effective and add the sense of realism to the audience. We are going to use a mixture of methods to get the sounds that we want, we are going to record some sounds ourselves using a  H4 pocket-size Multi-Track Audio Recorder, we will then import them onto our film. 

We are also going to find sounds from non-copyright websites. This is an example of one of the website i found the sound of 'footsteps'. This sound is perfect one particular scene- 'going upstairs and entering her room'. The only disadvantage with using the internet is that there are limited sounds as there are many that do not apply to our film. I have downloaded the one most suitable for our film and will apply to our film when editing.

Here is a list of Copyright free music/sound effects websites that i have searched on and have been found useful sounds for our film:

www.freesound.org

www.jamendo.com

www.freemusicarchive.org

www.proudmusiclibrary.com

We would like background music in our introduction when our character is writing the title and have been using the internet to find some music that fit what we would like.
One of our idea's of the type of music to use in the introduction is something previously used in the film Twilight, The New Moon. It is simple but shows the tone of the film to the audience right at the start. We want to use background music to add emotion and rhythm to our film, which enables the audience to understand the tone and mood of our film which allows them to already have an emotional attitude towards our story.