Production// Sound design

James Grimshaw worked with me on this project to develop the sound for this film. He'd recently downloaded REAPER which is a 'pay as you feel' music recording and editing software, similar to Pro Tools. Try Reaper here, http://www.reaper.fm/. It’s a wonderful piece of software and deserves more attention. The only issue we’ve had with it is finding out how to display video, which is fixed with a simple downloadable pluggin. 

After recording the dialogue of each character, we worked on making the quality of each as realistic as possible - but not so much as if you were standing right next to them. We focused on giving ‘room’ to the dialogue for instance if a character spoke in an empty room their voice echoed or if a character spoke away from another, their voice would be slightly muffled but still good quality. James is a self taught musician and was able to explain the software to me quite easily, I over saw the work he was doing on the dialogue however largely left him to editing. 

We used freesound.com to find high quality sound effects for certain effects for the film, however some were recorded just like characters voices were - in a Hyde Park basement. We found sound effects ranging from the weird to the very long and honestly too big to download considering we needed a tiny bit of a second of it. But we found some that worked great. James also created ‘tention’ sound effects with his own hands, using a guitar and a few guitar pedals - an example of this can be seen at the end of the first scene, where the characters anxiety grows as he has the door shut on him.

We did find that two of the recording sessions I’d done were very bad quality - one for Clovers character and the other for Harrys. With Clover the voice actor was very nervous and couldn’t help moving around a lot when delivering her lines, it took awhile for her to get comfortable enough to speak clearly and the final recording came out very quiet. With Harry his voice actor was also nervous but this time rushed and his final recordings came out quite flat. Luckily James was able to cover up the bad quality of the recording of Clovers character with ‘inside of a bus’ sound effects so her voice was still as loud as Bens but the bad quality of it wasn’t as noticeable under the bus sounds.

I also took a look back at classic cartoons to get inspiration for the sort of sound effects I wanted. I looked back at Loony Toons and a few vintage Disney animations. I thought the sound effects of each were effective however thought using similar would seem very out of place, back the aesthetic of my film isn't as 'cartoony' as these shows.