Sound Design

My main role in post-production was to be sound design. I really wanted to do the sound for this project, and on the day I know I recorded some good sounds to use for the sound design and I was looking forward to creating it.

Firstly, my intention was to use the heartbeat recording we took from Amelia to create a beat to carry through the entire film. I wanted to set the pace of the film with it. So I played around with a few beats and I finally settled on one I liked:




Once I was happy with that, I needed to add breathing and movement noises and sync that with the rough cut we had. I wanted to make the noises sound as if they were really close so that they would be obvious and to give the impression of closeness to the dancer. I planned to add a reverb to this later as well to make it sound as if the space was very large. I created a separate track for each side of the 'mirror'. I then added breathing and movement noises to these:





I was really happy with how this turned out, I had to play around with levels, but overall I thought that combined with the beat it sounded pretty good. To add emphasis to the movement noises I added some wooshing sounds to some of quick head flicks and some added sounds to hand movements. 

At this point I added reverb before I went any further. I wanted to make it sound like it was in as big of a room as possible and so I chose to use a large church as a base and then played around with the levels until it was just right.

I then wanted to start creating more of a loose melody with the piece so I started trying to create a couple of tracks to go on top of the main beat to gradually add in and take away throughout. I then had to focus on other parts of the film, finalising an edit over the weekend so my friend Rory Wheble kindly created a few tracks for me to try and play around with:



He really helped me out with making sounds like this one, and they made a great addition to the soundtrack. After I had finished this I had to rearrange the sounds as we now had a final cut to sync them to, and I still had some sounds to fill in because I left the VFX shots blank as I wasn't sure how they were going to look. After this was done I exported it and Tom did a final mix of the sound, and then we exported it. I really enjoyed making this soundtrack even though it took a long time and was quite tiring: