Checking in: I finished adding sound to the film and let me just say, it was QUITE the task. It actually wasn’t as hard as I was initially thinking, however it was a very tedious and time consuming step in the postproduction process. After watching the film with all of the sound inserted, I am so proud of it! I worked so hard to get it to be as close to our vision for it as possible and I think it turned out even better than I imagined! The hard work is starting to finally pay off…
Diving into the process: So, while I was playing around with editing, Hannah took the list of sounds I created and recorded all of them and sent them back to me as voice memos. This was actually really easy to work with because I could drag the voice memo files from messages directly into iMovie right where I wanted them. After that I trimmed them to exactly how long I needed them, and when you watch it back you can’t even tell that they weren’t part of the original audio! I was excited that they worked. Here’s a screenshot of what the sound effects looked like when Hannah sent them over:
I actually ended up keeping the original audio of a couple shots because they had the exact sounds we needed and didn’t have any extra noises. This saved us the extra work of trying to record the sounds we needed when really they’re already there in the original audio. However most of the other clips were still muted because there wasn’t any required sounds for those scenes.
After adding the sound effects, the movie came to life. The sounds made it look more realistic and more like an actual film. However it still needed some background music. At first I didn’t know quite how to get a sound that would go over the whole thing. I knew I wanted a horror ambiance sound that would increase the tension / fear of the film, but I didn’t want anything too over the top or to take away from the actual film itself. I needed a sort of mellow tune but still creepy enough. I searched around on Google and found a sound on YouTube that I really liked. It was free to use and download, so I downloaded the song onto my MacBook and it saved under iTunes. So then in iMovie I was easily able to access it under the “audio” tab and drag it to cover my whole film. I was super surprised that it actually lined up with my film seamlessly. When the demon appears in the apartment at the very end before the title appears, the music actually intensifies and gets louder! So it worked great. It also had some creepy chain noises that play while the title shows up so I think it really made the film ten times better. Here’s the link to the sound I used:
To finally conclude the sound stage, I decided that I wanted a noise to appear every time the hooded figure / demon popped up. This wasn’t something we originally planned, but I ended up loving it once I added it in. I looked up creepy horror sound effects on Google and found a website with a bunch of free downloadable ones. I looked through and found a higher pitched noise, it was quick and unsettling which fit perfectly with what I was needing it for. I again downloaded it like the other sound and inserted it where I needed it in iMovie. Here’s the link to the sound I used: http://soundbible.com/1814-Scary.html.
After adding all the sound, I watched the film over and over and I was so happy with how it turned out! I definitely learned how to use iMovie more in depth than I ever have before while creating this film. Take a look at how crazy it looks after adding everything in:
I’d like to say that Hear No Evil is FINALLY finished! Just a few more things to wrap up before I get to show you the final cut, so stay tuned!!
Hear No Evil 