The Editing Process - Sound

This is the speech that we have written to use as the voiceover for our trailer. It is supposed to be a doctor giving a diagnosis to Noah's mother about why he can no longer speak. We made sure to find a correct diagnosis and symptoms of selective mutism before writing the speech as we wanted it to be as naturalistic and believable as possible.

"Mrs Bloom, your son Noah has what is known as selective mutism. It is a childhood anxiety disorder where a child cannot speak in almost all social situations and often only in front of family members and close friends. However your son seems to have completely shut down. This is rare but has been linked to the result of some sort of psychological trauma. He may or my not speak again."

The first person we asked to record the voiceover was a drama teacher, Mr Beardsworth. Unfortunately we weren't able to use it due to the amount of background noise in the recording making it sound unprofessional and his voice was being drowned out. As well as this, there were several pauses when he was speaking and he accidentally fumbled a few words. Plus, through no fault of his, his accent didn't sound as professional as we would have liked because we needed someone quite posh to represent a doctor from London. Here is the first voiceover that we recorded but chose to not use.

We only realised that we needed to change this after very helpful audience feedback from people that we asked to listen to the first audio and give us constructive criticism on it. Nearly all of them told us that we needed to change it as they couldn't hear what he was saying clearly enough.

The second person we asked to record our voiceover was an english teacher, Mr Pickard. When reading through the script he sounded much more like a doctor and we liked the pace and rhythm he had whilst reading. As he is very well spoken it sounded a lot more like a doctor and we were very happy to use it for our voiceover. Here is the voiceover that we chose to use.



As well as the voiceover we also had music so therefore had to cut the voiceover and move parts of it around in order to adjust the sound levels for particular parts. When cutting the voiceover up we decided to overlap some of the audio as it not only made it run for a shorter amount of time but it got rid of the pauses and made the diagnosis clearer and more to the point. We also used an effect called 'telephone' which we added to the voiceover because it helped cancel out some of the background noise and gave the audio a sharper sound.

As you can see from this screenshot of the sound from our trailer we had to alter the levels of music and  use fades in order to put our voiceover in and be able to hear it. We were especially happy with our choice of song when doing this as the fades aren't obvious due to the repetition and echoes of lyrics which also helped with the timings as we could adjust and cut parts of the song to fit our trailer how we wanted it. This also made it a lot easier when ending the trailer as it could fade out without obviously missing out large parts of the song.