NON-DIEGETIC MUSIC AND SOUND EFFECTS

For our initial ideas we considered having the nursery rhyme ‘Georgie Porgie’ as we thought that the lyrics (“Kissed the girls and made them cry, when the boys come out to play Georgie Porgie ran away”) fitted the narrative quite well as it suggests the killer’s obsession with the young girls and that he disappears after he kills them. So we managed to get the soundtrack from ‘Youtube’ and imported it into ‘Soundtrack Pro’ where we altered the speed and pitch, which distorted the sound of the voices as the original soundtrack didn't sound right and fit the scene. We added this sound clip to our title sequence and copied and pasted it so that it ran for the whole length of the title sequence.

However, after watching our title sequence a number of times we decided that the nursery rhyme didn't quite fit and also didn't sound very sinister and so we came up with the idea of using a music box lullaby. We looked at different lullabies on ‘Youtube’ and found one that we really liked. We then used the same process as before to make our soundtrack sound contrapuntal and more sinister. We wanted to develop on our non-diegetic music and so we decided to have different layers of non-diegetic music and sound effects. We used ‘Soundtrack Pro’ to search and edit a sound clip so that we could incorporate it in our title sequence. The first sound clip that we used was of a group of violins playing at a low pitch.

This is helps to establish a tense mood indicative of the thriller genre as violins and orchestral music are conventions of a thriller. In order to increase the tension and suspense we used ‘Soundtrack Pro’ again to find a heartbeat sound effect which we copied and pasted so that it ran throughout the duration of the title sequence we wanted to do this in order to get the audience to match their heartbeat with that of the character. In our footage we found that the breathing was not loud enough and that there was too much background noise and so we used ‘Soundtrack Pro’ to get a sound clip of a female breathing so that it could be amplified to make the scene more intense and builds the tension.

We felt that there was a section of sound missing within the title sequence when the little girl is hugging the teddy in front of the tree and so we searched ‘Soundtrack Pro’, where we found a soundtrack that built the tension as it starts of quieter and gets louder and so this also suggests a cliff hanger as the tension is built up so much. We also found that there was another gap in the music where the title was and so we used ‘Youtube’ to search for a sound clip. By doing this we found and used a tiny clip from the theme for the film ‘Dead Silence’. We then edited the clip by cutting the music from the video and cutting the length of the sound clip because we only needed a short section of the music clip.

The short music clip that we used from ‘Dead Silence’ is sinister and so it helps to establish a tense mood indicative of the thriller genre. We were going to use a sound effect of children laughing because it implies the idea of children representing innocence. The idea of the children laughing could either be the innocence of the children laughing or that the children are laughing at the killer, maybe to suggest that the killer will be found out in the end. However, we found that this sound effect did not match the scene and we found that it didn't not create tension or suspense and so we decided to experiment with other ideas.