Post-production stage of sound – the part of the submission

This is the address to watch the full film.

I chose to submit the audio from 3:50-8:50 of this short film. I chose this section because it is richer in sound elements.

The first scene in this section, Mike suspects someone is upstairs and he goes upstairs with a baseball bat to determine the situation. Before, Mike’s nerves are on edge as he experiences a bizarrely disconnected phone call, an out-of-control printer and a sudden loud noise from upstairs. So he suspects that someone is screwing with him. I’m not plan to produce the sound of this section from objective perspective. The script describes this passage as ‘the sound of his footsteps on the floor. (It sounded like a heartbeat)’. At first I thought of overlaying the sound of footsteps and heartbeats and then aggravating that sound. And then I spoke to the director and found out that he didn’t want a heartbeat at all, and he said it was just a description. So in the end I chose to aggravate the sound of footsteps and add an unusual reverb. I also added ambient sounds that were not part of the scene to render the atmosphere. When Mike walked to the corridor, he had searched everywhere except the toilet, so his nerves were stretched to the limit. Looking at the world from his tense mental world, the sound of water in the bathroom is abnormal, and his own breathing is heavy. Mike pulls back the curtain to find that the loud noise from a dropped shower-head. He instantly relaxes and the sound becomes normal as he does so. The increasing frequency of the sound always creates a sense of tension, which is why I chose to create this ambient sound. Unusual sounds can also create a sense of tension and eeriness, such as the amplified sound of water, footsteps and breathing.

Then, Mike returns to the living room and talks to the printer. The director told me that after the ‘hello’ piece of paper, Mike’s mind slowly started to go out of whack. So he want the sound of the printer after the ‘hello’ piece of paper to slowly become unusual. He want the sound of printer make audience feel uncomfortable, but the sound still as a printer. My directly reaction was that the high frequency of the sound would make people feel uncomfortable, but I think it’s not enough. We know from the storyline afterwards that Mike had caused a car accident, and this had affected him a lot. So it’s logical that Mike would remember the events of that day very clear, even the conversations between the two victims before the accident. So I tried to mix the lines with the printer’s voice. Unfortunately, the result is not good. No matter how it was mixed, it always felt like two tracks instead of one. Finally, I gave up on this option and I opted to tweak the printer sound directly. I added mechanical elements and distorted the sound to make it sound broken in addition to raising the high frequency part of this sound.

Next come the dream section. I remembered a dream I’d had earlier in which I’d been running. Actually, Mike had been in a state of escape about what had happened that night too. So I decided to start the dream section with the sound of fleeing footsteps. In the dream, Mike had been running and panting. Those elements that he was trying to escape in the dream, like the woman’s screams, the chimes of the whole hour, the ambulance. The printer is an external sound, but it enters the dream and is distorted.

In the last part, Mike tries to throw the printer away but finds the door locked. He chooses to call the police. The script says ‘man voice trans to machine voice.’ At first I thought it was a human voice transfer to Siri or Google voice. But the director wanted me directly to change the human voice. ‘The first one is, are you scared?’ I add the mechanical element and dealt with the sentence break to make the voice sound like a robot’s voice.