DV Filmmaking

Chapter 18. Sound Design, from Nuts and Bolts to Fine Tuning

In this chapter

Refining the Natural Sound in Your Sequence

Adding Music to Your Film

The images in the mainTitle sequence you’ve been working on for the last few chapters have now been carefully structured and refined into a sophisticated, highly polished visual composition. The audio of the sequence, however, is still very basic. There’s no sound at all under the opening zoom, or under the title image, and other than a very cute a cappella number by Luca, there’s a distinct absence of music.

As discussed in detail in Chapter 17, a strong and effective sound design has a tremendous impact on an audience’s experience. Augmenting the sound in the mainTitle sequence and molding it into a carefully layered audio composition will result in an infinitely more worthwhile opening for your film.

The following exercises walk you through the finer points of layering sounds, adding music, using audio to bridge a transition from one part of your film to another, and constructing delicately balanced fades to weave individual sound elements into a well-crafted and truly effective sound mix.

Refining the Natural Sound in Your Sequence

As mentioned in Chapter 7, 16 mm and 35 mm film don’t record audio. Before the introduction of video cameras capable of recording both picture and sound onto a single tape, images and audio were recorded separately. In some ways, it created an added layer of technical complexity (for instance, an editor had ...