Originally we had ‘Kidulthood’ in mind while making our film and so I looked into music of the ‘Grime’ genre, used to represent youths and what they are listening to. After this reasearch I understood that most tracks of this genre were around 140bpm and usually had a male MC rapping over them. Due to this, I set about making a grime track using the software ‘Garage Band’ at 140 beats per minute. I then found a royalty free clip of a grime MC acapella at the same bpm and was then able to cut the clips together to create a copywrite free tune, but without the need to actually ask somebody I knew to attempt rap vocals, which would take too much time and probably sound unproffessional. The track was effective and definately riffed on the themes of youth running through our film. I even edited the sound of a few different phones ringing into a tune, to further identify with youngsters.
However, I had made this before the actual film at hand and once it was created we realised that the track didn’t really fit with the film, both stylisticly (The location originally in mind was mainly on the streets but we ended up setting a lot of it outside) and that there was just no audio/visual relation so I knew I had to change and adapt what I had already made.
Our film was almost all dialogue, so in the end I decided not to include any non diagetic sound whatsoever because it would disrupt the rest of the film and be out of place. I also belive that by having no non diagetic sound we fit the genre of a social commentry better, and personaly I was influenced by the Dogme 95 style of filmmaking, of having no music and only natural lighting, creating a more realistic feel to the film and making it seem quite raw and edgy. In fact, a film that is shot in this way “Red Road” hugely unfluenced me by opening my eyes to how effective silence can be. There is a scene in our extract that includes somebody being pushed over and hurt, I could have done the predictible and included a dramatic sound effect, but by not having any sound at all the result is much edgier and almost tests the viewer by not using sound to tell them what they should think, but instead allowing them to decide the emotion they feel over the incident for themselves.
I worked in a collaborative manner with my group after knowing this was the choice I was going to go for, and so the editing was done in a fast fashion, deliberately leaving no space for intervals but being completely understandable due to having a good script. We wanted this breathless feel to add a sense of panic, this feel was also helped by our use of inturuption within the dialogue, and so I had to layer sounds in some areas to make the conversation still flow.
The green areas in the picture are sound, and you can see where I have used overlapping for effect.
I had asked the actors to speak clearly so that their voices were clear and they all did brilliantly but unfortunately there was a lot of wind on the camera which I hadn’t noticed when watching the film on the mac, but then when played to the class it became clear and I had a lot of feedback about how I could have dealt with this. If I could have done the project again I would have removed the sound from the clips completely and asked the actors to completely re-record their lines for a more crisp and clean sound. There was no other critical feedback relating to sound, and I am glad that people understood how music was not neccisary for a film of this type.
In conclusion, I am happy with the choices made within my micro element, but I do wish I had asked the actors to overdub their lines. I also wish that I had used the song I had made over the end credits, as I feel it would have helped express our ‘Kidulthood’ influence more strongly without inturrupting the feel of the rest of the film.
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