Background Sound Effects Cutting For Films Or Tv

Background Sound Effects Cutting For Films Or Tv

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The three important types of sound we use in films and television are referred to as hard effects, Foley, and backgrounds. The difference between the types is primarily their length. Hard effects will ordinarily short sounds like gunshots, light switches, a big slap on face, glass smashing, etc. Backgrounds normally begin in the beginning of the scene and carry on all the way to the finish of the scene. As an example, if the scene we editing on is staged at a city park, we'll rarely not contain effects like birds chirping and singing from the beginning of the scene to the end of it even though birds usually are not seen all the time and in a lot of cases, not seen in any way.

Why do we have to have the background sound effects?

If you ever look at a footage of the film as it had been recorded on location you are going to understand that it's somewhat dead as much as ambiance sounds. For example, in case you see a scene in a bar you will see a lot people speaking but you may only hear the voices of the important characters. The way in which this really is done is usually that the people who you see speaking are basically pretending to be talking or speaking in very low voices. Clearly, this is very unnatural for us humans to watch considering within real bar there really are a lot of people speaking. If the people in the bar were talking normally, that would have made it hard for the mixer to mix it in a way that the audience can easily understand the dialogue of the main actors (which is always the most important).

In order to make it more natural, the sound editor can add in the sound effect of men and women speaking (sometimes called "Walla"). The editor will also add other sound to help the scenes seem more realistic such as glass cups clinking, drinks mixing, room tones, perhaps an off stage billiard game and much more.

What is room tones? Inside of pretty much any room you enter you'll notice some kind of sound. It could be from your air condition, it could be from city traffic outside, it can be from a refrigerator or some thing else. You don't at all times notice it but our brain is quite use to hearing those sounds all the time. Then to make the film as natural to us humans as real-life, we always add room-tones on internal scenes. Once scenes are outdoors, we have the choice of including traffic or wind. Additionally to making the movie appear much more natural they are also very helpful for the dialogue mixer because the dialogue coming in to the mix stage might have times when the background noise in the dialogue recordings have noticeable changes as well as holes. A background sounds are helpful to mask those holes.

But, the most important reason we add backgroundsound effects is to make a movie or Television show richer. The backgrounds are excellent for setting the atmosphere that your director would like the audience to experience. As an example, you can have two different films which are shot at the precise same location in a city, let's say one romantic movie and one suspenseful. In a romantic film we will put light city traffic elements, nearly no horns, wind in the trees, and birds. For the suspenseful film you can add very heavy city traffic, people honking , police sirens, nervous crowd voices, helicopters, etc. Together with music, the background sounds is a fantastic instrument of setting the mood for a film.

Have fun cutting

David Mann

About the Author:
David Mann is a sound designer leaving and editting in Holliwood Ca, David is also the manager of http://www.freshcutsoundeffects.com an online royalty free sound effect library.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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