Sound Design for a Moving Image
A Clip from ‘The Woman in Black’ (2012)
For the best experience make sure to wear headphones!
The Project
For this project, I was tasked with creating a soundscape for a short 3-7 minute film clip of my choosing. The idea behind this was to enhance the viewing experience of the piece by creating a rich and textured audio experience. We were expected to create our soundscape from the ground up, experimenting with foley art and producing sounds from scratch. Given that we did this under lockdown conditions we were limited to using items we could find round the house to create our sounds.
I decided to use a clip from ‘The Woman in Black’ (2012), starring Daniel Radcliffe. Besides being one of my all-time favourite horrors, the film itself is extremely effective at creating an intense atmosphere throughout which in my opinion is for the most part due to the sound design and mixing. In terms of scene selection, I have decided to use the scene where Arthur Kipps, the protagonist is exploring the eel marsh house. At this point in the movie there is a 20-minute segment where there is no dialogue whatsoever with the attention switching to many of the unsettling sounds that can be heard around the house.
As well as creating and recording my own sounds, I was also given the opportunity to learn how to create a 360 degree surround sound editing effect using an Adobe Audition plugin called Sennheiser Ambeo Orbit. Being able to implement a surround sound feel for some of my chosen tracks, allowed me to create what I felt was a more authentic, immersive audio experience for the audience. In addition to diegetic sounds, I also decided to use some of my basic knowledge of the Garage band software to create my own non-diegetic soundtrack for some of the segments.
Overall, I received very positive feedback for my work on this project and to date I feel it is one of my most impressive pieces of work.