Minoli De Silva & Alice Lupton

Sound is vital to our documentary, as the strength of the narrative rests on the voiceover. Unlike a short film where messages can be conveyed solely through visuals, the documentary requires spoken word in the form of a narration as well as the opinions expressed by our various interviewees.

Alice and I decided to divide the sound role between the two of us as we both wanted to gain experience in dealing with sound –previously it had always been another member of the group. Additionally, as we had also decided to divide editing, it made sense to delegate the work load in this way so we would each have a roughly even amount of work to do.

We needed to produce a voiceover, find background music and ensure that the sound levels for each of the interviewees matched. We also required one or two sound effects e.g. a typing sound effect

Minoli Alice

Diegetic Levels Levels

Non -Diegetic VoiceoverBackground music

Sound Effects

Who?I asked my friend Holly Essex to record the voiceover as she has experience in public speaking and is confident and capable of delivering a professional sounding performance.

How?I gave Holly a copy of the voiceover transcript prior to recording so that she could familiarise herself with what she would be reading. I then booked the school recording studio and we used Cubase – a piece of software within which music/sounds can be arranged, recorded and edited - to record the voiceover. Just before recording I asked if there was anything Holly was unsure of, or anything she wanted to rephrase. After some minor adjustments, we began recording. The voiceover was split into paragraphs and Holly read each paragraph then paused for 3 seconds before continuing. This was done for the sake of later on when it came to editing: gaps between meant that it would be easier to change the order of paragraphs if needed or to isolate sections needed for editing. Once the track was recorded I changed the pitch slightly and saved the file as an MP3 ready to be transferred to the Mac computer we were editing on.

This is the original recording of the voiceover. For the sake of time I have shortened the pauses between each paragraph and any takes where a mistake was made.

At the end of this recording there is also an alternative opening: I asked Holly to record this in case we decided to open the documentary in a different way.

Minoli:Another key aspect to sound was ensuring that levels were even throughout the project This potentially could have been exceedingly complex as we had several interviews recorded in different places with varying levels.For example the interview with Ms. Trapp was quite loud while the interview with Aaron was very quiet in some sections: to achieve a professional finish we needed to ensure that all sound levels were even and matched and there wasn’t any major disparity.

Alice:This meant that when the clips had been log and captured/imported in to Final Cut, we looked at the sound levels individually and made sure that the sound was at the correct level of between -12 and -6, not allowing it to peak above this, otherwise it would be too loud. I could adjust the sound bar on each individual clip on its own, but even when it was at the highest it could be, the clip would still be too quiet, such as with Aaron’s interviews, so I made the decision to double it up by copying and pasting the sound and placing further below the original sound to increase the levels.

The decision to use background music came from the fact that it is a convention for Documentary Film. It usually helps the audience to identify the tone of the documentary so that they know how seriously they have to take it. As we wanted our documentary to be upbeat and happy, defeating the generalised view that Autism is a taboo subject , we found upbeat and happy score music.After listening to a few different tracks on Incomptech and YouTube, our final choice was called “that positive feeling/upbeat ukulele music” as it was light-hearted and easy to listen to. We didn’t want the background music to be overpowering of what the interviewees or the voiceover were saying, but we wanted it to compliment the overall tone.

Sound effects weren’t really of major importance in our documentary as there was nothing to put sound effects on, apart from one section at the beginning. If we used sound effects then it would have made the documentary seem more comedic than it should have been, and we felt it may have been distracting the audience away from what they were meant to be focusing on i.e the voiceover, interviewees, or the graphics which were there to support the voiceover. The only sound effect we used was of the typing sound on the very first graphic of the documentary in order to make it seem as though the word “Autism” was being typed out on a computer screen, as this is what the graphic style intended.

There weren’t too many problems with sound in our documentary, and if there were, they were fairly easy to overcome.For example, as we filmed different interviews in different locations, it meant the sound levels were very different from each other, so it took a long time to match them, however this wasn’t difficult, just time-consuming. With the voiceover, we felt there were some sections which were too long so we cut them down, and sometimes it was difficult to find a clean point to cut the sentence without it sounding unnatural, but it meant we had to zoom in to the sound and it cut out certain syllables which was fairly fiddly. The soundtrack was the easiest to modify. We had to cut the end of the soundtrack off and add a new section in of the same soundtrack to make it seem like a continuous loop, but once we had matched this, we could just copy and paste it until the end of the documentary, where we would use the end of the soundtrack.