So we just created out expertise video and there’s one thing I learnt that I never knew before. And that is how powerful folly sounds are – more specifically, how powerful creating your own folly sounds are.

So prior to making the expertise videos – I never recorded my own folly sounds for my own short films. Most of the time, I would go onto YouTube or some free sound website and just search up the sound effect I needed and overlay it on top of the video clip. However, this was the first time I actually thought about the sounds I wanted BEFORE I worked on the visuals.

The problem with using free sounds off the internet was that they didn’t fit the context well sometimes. For example, if I had a character who was walking along a wooden bridge, it would make no sense to use the sound effects of walking on concrete. Thus, by creating the sounds myself and then creating the footage afterwards, I was able to make each action and movement more believable and realistic.

And I never realised how easy it is to create sound effects yourself by just using random stuff you find laying all over the uni campus. For example, to recreate sounds of bones breaking; we cracked twigs and stabbed cardboard boxes.

And it just gives the shot so much more impact. Having someone walking through a bush about 6 metres away from the on-board camera microphone – you would never pick up the sounds of the leaves swaying and swishing. But by shaking a bush and recording its sound, we were able to overlay that and make it seem as if the camera was picking up all the sounds on its own.

Folly is something I never considered creating myself, but its definitely something I will be doing on my own from now on!