Audio

I had wanted to use audio fairly early on to give the piece more mood and backstory, since there isn't time to convey the things I need through any other means. I also didn't want to over-explain, since making the audience intrigued to see more is a major goal of mine.

The format that made the most sense was disembodied voices, echoing in Manny's mind as he checks how much time he has left in the mirror for the millionth time. Manny would be distraught and his mind would be a mess of panicked thought, memories and emotions, so I wanted to convey that inescapable feeling, the feeling that these Mafia men were hounding him even now and he can't run away no matter where he goes.

I considered finding some samples, but quickly gave up on that idea in favour of recording my own, not wanting to have copyright issues, and also for my own satisfaction of having as much of this work as possible be my own. Had time not been a factor I would have done my own music too, since I love that, but it gets impractical to go that far. So I shut myself in my room with a Skype headset, some reasonable headphones and a copy of Audacity, and set to work.

Finding the characters was the first challenge. I wanted a mixture of different people, sounding like snippets of scenes we haven't seen yet, memories of conversations (or 1-sided conversations where perhaps Manny was in no position to speak). I wanted to focus on the bad guys, but ended up slipping a sympathetic female voice in the mix to sort of say what Manny would be thinking. I had a few lines thought up, but the lines seemed to come organically through trying take after take to get a convincing criminal character going. I must have done hundreds of takes just talking in a particular voice, trying to iron out vowels or tones that didn't fit with the next try. I learned a valuable trick just by experimenting, it was crucial to making that mobster-sounding guy to actually distort my mouth a lot while speaking.

The effects I used to push the sound further from just sounding like me were what closed the deal. Accents and mouth-mangling can get you so far, but you are physically working with a different set of pipes than some people. So the pitch changer was employed carefully to make me bigger and scarier, or in one case female. The noise removal was essential to getting a clean recording, and was a huge help. The reverb topped it off, and required a lot of fiddling (reverb has many parameters!) but in the end I feel like I nailed the 'surfacing memory' sound without washing it out too much and adversely affecting clarity. I also used the DeEsser in Premiere, although its effect was quite subtle.

For the backing music, I knew I needed something sombre and building, like a serious movie trailer, so I trawling Free Music Archive for a while. Eventually, after deciding against choral music (conflicts with spoken audio which is more important) I found a lovely bit of soundtrack work by Kevin MacLeod called 'Devastation and Revenge'. Perfect. Even more perfect was the length of its moody intro, before suddenly arresting the listeners attention right when I cut to black. With minimal fiddling it slotted right in! This piece really caps off the mood of the video for me, colouring how the audience interprets the voices and providing a great crescendo.