Post 13 & 14: Sound in Love Actually and 13 Reasons Why

Our Task

Our task was to look at the original clips and identify the sounds within them, so that when given a clip with the sound taken from it, we could make our own recordings, find the relevant music, and then add it to the muted clip.

These are the original clips we were given to watch/listen to:

Diegetic and Non-Diegetic Sound

Diegetic sounds are the sounds that can be seen being produced in the film, like a character speaking, or an object being put down on a table. Non-diegetic sound is when the sound cannot be seen in the filmed scene, like a soundtrack or a narrator's commentary.

The Recording Process

To get the recording of the voice in the Love Actually clip, we used the microphone that can be attached to my camera, this made sure that the recording quality was higher, and there wouldn't be too much noise, like a recording on a phone often has, or a recording from a camera's built-in microphone. I then converted the video into an mp3, making it the audio only, and able to be put into Premier Pro as an audio track. For this one I had to reorganise the audio clip, as it wasn't quite timed correctly, meaning I had to take away or change the length of some pauses. The actor was chosen because of their accent, it's quite similar to Hugh Grant's, which is well pronounced.

The microphone was not available for the recording of the 13 Reasons Why clip, which is why there is a little more noise in it. This clip was quite different from the Love Actually audio, as there were more elements to take into account. Whilst the Love Actually clip had the voiceover and the music, the 13 Reasons Why clip had both of these but also with the sound of footsteps, and the bell at the end. The actor for this was chosen because she is about the same age as the original actor in this clip, making it sound more similar.

Evaluation

I think that this task was quite successful the newly made audios are quite similar to the originals. The only problems I had with this was that the music used in the original Love Actually introduction was hard to find, so we ended up using the most similar one we could find that was on the soundtrack. The other difficulty we had was getting the last words ("love actually is all around") to be paced correctly with the words that appear on the screen. We ended up working out how to do this, however, by taking out some of the pauses in the lines before hand, and creating a bigger pause between 'actually' and 'is.'