Soundtrack For Experimental Film

For our sense of place piece, we wanted to convey the sense of a nondescript busy place/places to our audience. We had numerous difficulties when doing this as we didn't want it to be very obvious what sounds reflected what particular image so there was an enigma around the whole soundtrack. However we did include sounds of noisy places with hundreds of peoples voices speaking in unison so we didn't make the whole project reliant on just the images. Our intention overall with the piece was to show how nobody has time for one another and how everyone is just caught up in their own little worlds and we did this by using a lot of layers over the top of one another and merging in convocations within layers of traffic noise, atmos tracks of places like the market and the train station to try and portray those small bubbles people live in.

This screen grab of the starting sequence shows the layering of the different sounds we used to give a sense of a busy place and we did this to attempt to make the sound cluttered and hard to distinguish one sound from the other to add to the busy feel of it. We also used repetition of the same sounds again and again in a loop to try and play on the fact that people are stuck in routines and as they don't attempt to change it in anyway or try and break out of their 'bubble' they get more and more complacent and start to loose their originality and flare and become just another person stuck in the busy place. I think the techniques we used to apply these ideas into the piece were very effective and didn't sound too abstract so you could still hear where the place was.

Another technique we used was changing and manipulating sounds through the addition of effects in soundtrack pro. We only recorded about 30 minutes of raw sound to really try and lock down that sense of one whole place, but we altered the sounds to make them more abstract and distorted to try and connote the warped way in which everyone hears these sounds everyday when they're in a busy place, but they never really listen and absorb the sounds and just let them go unnoticed. What we tried to do was make these sounds more abrupt and harsher to listen to as to draw the attention of the audience to these sounds and make them question if this is what they really sound like.

With the traffic noise of a car rumbling at the start of the clip, we actually used the sound of a train starting to set off and edited out the high frequency hissing sounds to get just the bass rumble of the trains engine. We then highlighted a specific frequency of this rumble and then cut a small section of the whole clip out and repeated it in a loop which gave us the desired effect of a cars engine 'chugging' along but in a whole new abstract way. We carried on this repetition of certain remastered sounds throughout the soundtrack to carry on the sense of place.

Our final piece before we presented it in our group tutorial, in our eyes, had matched the brief and given a good sense of place (even though we tried to hide it a little in just the soundtrack) and was very effective in connoting our ideas and inspirations we used to create it.