Planning sound. Miss miller

Sound is important within a thriller film as it is one of the key aspects of mise-en-scene. Sound can really engage the audience with what is on the screen and connects all your senses together so you can immerse yourself within the film. Planning sound is important as we always want to know what each frame is going to contain. Even if it is a silent moment, it needs to be documented so we can edit it in. I will be going over four sounds which we will be using in our thriller.

The first is a digetic sound. A diegetic sound is a sound that belongs within a frame and can be considered to be a natural part of the narrative. This is not always visible on screen. In our seen, we are using the sound of birds. We are doing this to pull the audience into a false sense of security. We are making the audience hear a sound which they can relate to making them feel slightly more relaxed. This allows them to be more venerable when it comes to a scene with tension or suspense.

 

The second sound technique is a parallel sound. This is when the sound and the images on the screen complement each other.  The sound used here is Lucy’s scream when she finds me dead over a tree.  The scream connotes the scene well as she has just realised this dead body. The audience can see this and would not only be in fear after seeing what has happened but they would also sympathise with Lucy as they can see and hear her screaming.

Another sound technique is an off screen sound. This is when you can hear the sound but cannot see the source, yet it still makes sense with the film dynamic. For example in our film he is using heavy breathing. We will not be able to see the breathing itself but we can hear it. This makes the audience feel tense as in thrillers heavy breathing connotes the fact that something bad is going to happen. The audience have a foreboding feeling that when the breathing stops, death is round the corner. All this builds up a great deal of suspense amongst all the audience.

The final sound technique is a non diagetic sound. This is a sound or music that is added after, such as in the editing stage. The diagetic sound we are using is a hum. The reason we are doing this is because is conventional thriller films, we always hear unnatural sounds. Something that will take us out of our comfort zone. This is exactly what we are doing here.  A hum will once again leave the audience in suspense as an unnatural noise normally leads to an unnatural event. Nothing is normal or as it seems anymore, the situation has changed and the non diagetic sound will connote that.

I feel that with these four features and others, our group will really effectively be able to capture the key things needed in order for this to be an effective thriller. We can now incorporate each one of these features thanks to the planning stage and we can determine how effective each technique is to make sure we enhance the audiences fear to their full potential.

 The following sounds are ideas we have taken from freesound.com, a non copyrighted sound site. These are all non-diagetic sounds. we will implement these into our editing program and overlay the sounds with the picture on the screen. This first sound is a piano which draws suspense.

http://www.freesound.org/people/Erokia/sounds/209552/

These two sounds next are breathing. We will decide what breathing we want for our killer.

http://www.freesound.org/people/zogmachine/sounds/202606/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Erdie/sounds/48512/  

The final two are just further suspense clips. One is with a heartbeat and by using the heartbeat, it can create a closer personal and emotional connection between the character in the scene and the audience.

http://www.freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/170207/

http://www.freesound.org/people/Batsumaru/sounds/203249/