For my film project one, Missed Moments, one of the things that I had to edit was its sound. I’ve edited quite a few types of videos before, but this is my first time to edit a film and it’s different from what I’ve been doing before.

I used to rely only on background music and cut the visuals according to the beats of the song. However with film, I can’t really depend solely on music playing in the background, as it has to be more realistic. Thus, I had to implement sound effects that matches an action in the visual (footsteps, notification sound), as well as aiding the shot with ambience sounds most times and use background music only at certain times.

Searching for free music and sound effects online was hard, as most requires us to pay for royalty free music. Nonetheless, I found a few sources which I relied upon for this project. For free background music, I used a few music from Youtube’s Audio Library channel, specifically their cinematic music playlist. While as for ambience sounds and sound effects, Freesound provides a really great and pretty complete database, and as long as you sign up you can access them all for free, which is really great. Looking for sounds can be challenging as well, as we need sounds that really matches the visual.

Lastly, editing.  After finding the right sounds to work with, it’s time to actually match them. I’ll take footsteps as an example, as it is one of the more challenging ones. For footsteps, the sfx that we found online will not match our visuals 100% because the walking speed might differ, thus, what i did was either cut the sounds of each steps and match them individually to the visual, or used the stretch tool to either speed it up or slow it down so it matches perfectly the walking speed in the visual.

For other sound effects, it’s pretty much just finding the right sounds and then add them at the right time. There’s also editing with only ambience sounds, where I had to basically find the right rhythm and timing to cut shots, as I don’t really have a beat to base my cuts on. It was definitely a bit more challenging, but the more I did it, it becomes easier and was quite fun as well.

In the end, editing sounds for film has been quite an interesting experience. I definitely have way more to learn, as our film didn’t actually use that much sounds as say, action or horror film. Thus, I would love to do more for film project two.

xx