Sound in a horror movie trailer is very crucial and can make or break a persons judgment upon the film. It could either entice and draw the viewer in or make them not want to watch the film. The sound needs to create atmosphere and add tension where needed.
The sound should strongly correlate with the genre of the movie, as we are focusing on horror trailers within our project the sound within our trailer should be dark, dreary and consist of drones, screams etc. as this is the norm within horror trailers I've previously looked at. Another very effective thing used within the sound of horror trailers is silence which I believe should be used a lot within my groups trailer.
To create the sound within our horror trailer we were told to use the programs 'Soundtrack Pro' & 'GarageBand'. We were also allowed to use various sound websites such as 'freesound.org' and 'freesfx.com'. For our created sound we didn't use GarageBand as much as we would have liked instead we relied on Soundtrack Pro and the two websites I mentioned prior to this.
I decided that the sound for our trailer 'HUSH' should start off quite slow and gradually build up to a continuous drone which would be the main sound of the trailer adding the scary atmosphere to the fast parts of the trailer. I also decided we needed to try and implement quite a lot of jump scares with loud bangs in unexpected places within the trailer.
For the rest of this page I will show you my inspiration for the sound within our trailer, how we constructed it, the stages of our sound then finally our finished product.
The sound should strongly correlate with the genre of the movie, as we are focusing on horror trailers within our project the sound within our trailer should be dark, dreary and consist of drones, screams etc. as this is the norm within horror trailers I've previously looked at. Another very effective thing used within the sound of horror trailers is silence which I believe should be used a lot within my groups trailer.
To create the sound within our horror trailer we were told to use the programs 'Soundtrack Pro' & 'GarageBand'. We were also allowed to use various sound websites such as 'freesound.org' and 'freesfx.com'. For our created sound we didn't use GarageBand as much as we would have liked instead we relied on Soundtrack Pro and the two websites I mentioned prior to this.
I decided that the sound for our trailer 'HUSH' should start off quite slow and gradually build up to a continuous drone which would be the main sound of the trailer adding the scary atmosphere to the fast parts of the trailer. I also decided we needed to try and implement quite a lot of jump scares with loud bangs in unexpected places within the trailer.
For the rest of this page I will show you my inspiration for the sound within our trailer, how we constructed it, the stages of our sound then finally our finished product.
INSPIRATION
To make sound for a trailer trying to be as professional as possible of course we had to look at the sounds within existing big budget, professional movie trailers and take a look at the kind of elements we would need to include to make our trailer sound as professional as possible. For our teaser trailer we took inspiration from quite a few different existing trailers implementing different aspects of these trailers helped us make our final outcome.
Listening to the sound within the trailer for the film 'Sinister' there wasn't a lot I could have taken inspiration from but one thing I did really like and tried to implement within the sound for our team's trailer 'HUSH' was the static at the beginning of the trailer (0:09-0:12) I believe this gives a trailer a horror like feel from the get go because it's almost like a jump scare as you're not really expecting it to happen, it's also a connotation for a lack of communication for example trying to contact someone for help through a mobile phone, most of the time within a horror film a static sound would be used for this form of communication breaking down (which seems to happen a lot within horror films).
While making the sound for our trailer we also listened to the sound of the trailer for the recent remake of the movie 'Carrie', we looked at this trailer in particular as the concept of the movie is very similar to ours and so we could take some of the elements of this trailer and implement these into ours, one thing we took from listening to this sound is the continuous droning sound (1:00-1:10) after listening to that sound we decided we wanted to implement our own drone within our sound this led us to find one we all liked and eventually add it to what we had this added a backbone to our sound it also added to the horror genre feel everyone is trying to portray in their teaser trailers.
STAGES OF SOUND
We started constructing the sound for our trailer by listening to a lot of sounds from the default software we were given for sound (Soundtrack Pro) and testing them in different parts/positions on our trailer to see whether they fit in with the situation or not. We eventually found a low key horror droning sound for our establishing shot which is the first sound on the second track. The first track is original sound taken from the footage we filmed. We also found a static sound which was used to complement the static blur effect that Abi had previously added. We also found a sound from one of the website I mentioned 'freesound.org' which we thought would be good as a sound for when our main character gets punched and loses consciousness for a few seconds this also complements the out of focus effect Abi had added to the trailer.
At this point nothing was really added to the sound except for one thing which is the sound seen on top of the original sound from the filming of the footage this is in fact dialogue which we thought would be better to make the trailer make more sense and give it more order as we decided we didn't want our trailer to just be a montage of clips of the killer killing people randomly and so we added this after filming. We did try to film and record the dialogue while filming but it didn't seem as though the dialogue was loud, crisp or clear enough for us to use and so we organised a time period with the two people who talked within the trailer so that we could re-record what they had said and add it over the top of the previous dialogue that was their. I feel as though we did a good job with this as it gave our trailer a stronger direction. To record this we used a Rode video mic mounted on a video camera which was provided to us by the college.
I then decided we needed to add more tension and scare factor to the trailer, one of the main parts i thought needed this was before and during the part where the bully punches the main character 'Johnny'. To do this a sound that dramatically sped up the tempo of the trailer was needed the sound we found on the website 'freesound.org' to do this is entitled '196729_paulmorek_build-02' this sound was very effective as it built up the speed of the whole trailer very quickly which allowed it to cause a shock factor when the tension building is spontaneously halted to allow the punching sound to come through, this draws the attention to the punch and therefore adds a more shocking effect to it.
After this I noticed that the bulk of the trailer was missing some kind of uniformity or a sound to act as a backbone as the majority of the sound was different so I needed one sound to join all the other sounds together. The sound entitled 'running_away_from_the_nightmare' served this purpose and did it's job quite successfully.
This is the final product of our SoundTrack Pro file. To finish the sound off we still needed a sound to act as the main sound we wanted to stick with the viewer after they had watched the trailer which we found finally on a sound website this is the sound called 'Horror SFX Copy' near the end of the trailer on the third track. This was a continuous drone which we decided to implement after watching some existing trailers such as 'Carrie' which also contained a continuous drone. At this point I also added some background sounds and ambient sound which helped add atmosphere to the finished product.
The image above is a screenshot of the website 'freesound.org' which is one of the main sites I used to gather the bulk of the sound/sound effects for our finished trailer, although while searching for sounds on this website you had to be quite specific and know what kind of sound you wanted as there as so many sounds on this website it was a very useful site and without it I doubt a lot could have been in regards to sound.
Within the sound for our trailer we decided to include dialogue to give our trailer direction and structure although we did run into a few problems because of this. One of the main problems we ran into with this was the fact that at first we recorded the dialogue while we were recording the actual footage not separately and so the dialogue wasn't as loud or crisp as we would have liked and could barely be heard.This led to us deciding to re-record the dialogue by getting the actors within the trailer to meet us at a convenient time and record them saying what was originally said but instead into a microphone this helped us achieve a clearer, crisper and louder dialogue therefore improving the sound within our trailer. Although by doing this we noticed that the voice over and the actors' lips moving weren't completely in sync but we decided this was a minor problem and not something we needed to worry about too much. The final problem we faced was the fact that the dialogue we re recorded was kind of comical and made some people laugh due to one of the actors accent. Because of this we had to change the level and deepen the voice over to make it less funny and more serious because if this part was too comical it would draw attention away from one of the best parts of our trailer. |
This is the end section of our final product, the main sound throughout this section of our product is the continuous drone you can hear from the beginning as I've said previously we took inspiration for this from trailer's such as 'Carrie'. At the part where the hand of our masked antagonist can be seen trying to grab the victim we used a loud thud type noise which we thought would bring a shocking effect to that part as it switches quite dramatically from the droning noise to the thud. We also dragged that sound on for a bit longer as we decided it fades out or blends out better rather than having it just stop spontaneously. Something else we added was a knife slashing sound effect which we got from the website 'freesound.org' we thought this would give the knife slash scene more of a horror effect the sound we found was very raw and rugged which helped a lot in giving it the horror effect. One major thing about the sound that we ended up changing was the the sound leading up to and during the 'Coming Soon' caption which started off as a sound called 'dumdum' which as the name implies was just a two beat sound this as we were told from our audience wasn't very effective and so we decided as a team to change the sound to a more rugged, loud and shocking sound as can be heard in the sound to the left. The last thing we weren't too sure about but decided to stick with was the sound at the end which is a dragging sound we thought it was too subtle and didn't really go with the scary theme we were trying to portray but in the end we decided it was good enough and not a lot of sound was needed for that.
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