Sound

After starting the editing process and talking through our progress in the tutorial, we decided that sound should be a crucial, key element of the film that we could work on to really fit well with the photographic imagery to be effective to the audience. Agreeing that music would take the audience out of the film, we chose to work on the foley that would work most creatively against the silence.

We had already recorded foley on the shoot day, but it was difficult to pick up on the mic properly with lack of materials to use and too much background noise. Therefore, we booked out the sound studio at the film school to use for a whole day session, to record as much as possible to play around with in the sound design. 

During this day we recorded the most obvious sounds which would have come from the main character and her surroundings, using Avid Pro Tools and Audacity. These included:

• Footsteps - we tried out a few new ways to create this other than just actual footsteps, such as tapping wood or concrete. The best one we discovered was leather on wood, which sounded great when an echo was added.
• Heavy breathing - here I stood quite close to the mic and simply breathed a few different ways to portray certain emotions to the audience which wouldn't be as obvious in still photographs, such as fear or confusion, which was achieved by changing the speed or depth of my breathing.
• The razor - in the film the character picks up the razor and also drops it, and we wanted an exaggerated sound of the razor blade to emphasise its significance in the film. To do this we simply scraped a knife blade across the blade of the razor to get a nice metallic sound.
• Elastic - a main part of the narrative is that the character cannot free herself from the restraint attached to her, but she can in fact stretch it, even if it takes a lot of effort. It is made of elastic, and so in the studio we simply recorded the sound of elastic being stretched, which made an exaggerated crunchy sound. This would be useful to emphasise the importance of her restraint.
• Freeing herself - the protagonist uses the razor to cut the elastic rope from her, and so this is exactly what we recorded. We held it really close to the mic so that the sound would be loud and clear to play around with in the sound design. 
• Clothes rustling - as the character moves, so would the dress she is wearing. To create a more realistic effect of this happening to the audience, we recorded the sound of clothes rustling, which may be useful to us when editing sequences of movement together.

We also recorded some other sounds which may not be useful at all, but we thought it might be a good idea to experiment with them in post-production incase they created effective sounds that fit nicely with the foley to add more atmosphere to the film. These included paper ripping and blowing into a can.