Production - Adding Sound Effects Through editing

 After adding editing the first part of the film and adding visual effects, the next step was adding sound effects to give the product detail and depth that follows our script.

The 2 main sound effects being a continuous loud heartbeat and a piano stinger to be used as a startling sound.

To find these sound effects Samuel looked at free sound effect banks to avoid copyright. Finding the stinger was simple and did not take long, but finding a heartbeat sound that was high quality and could be looped was difficult as many of the files we found contained clicking or sounded off. In the end, we settled on a short heartbeat that would need to be edited to be used.

To edit the heartbeat I went into FL Studio a Digital Audio Workstation and imported the heartbeat sound effect where I used an equalizer to slightly boost some of the bass of the audio track to give it more impact, I also added a slight reverb to add a small amount of echo, looped the heartbeat to make a longer track that could be used for longer and sped up the audio track a bit to make it sound like a raised heartbeat.

I then went into the edited project and added the sound effects to the project making sure they fit what was on screen and that they did not leak into other scenes, while ensuring the sounds were loud enough to be clearly heard.

I placed the jump scare stinger when Lilly is woken up. This gives context and provides nondiegetic sound that relates to Lilly being startled. To do this I lined up the sound effect to the moment where she was woken up on the timeline. I also faded out the sound effect to avoid the harsh click and the end of the sound effect while also fitting the sound effect until the end of the scene to not allow the sound effect to bleed into the next scene.

The heartbeat was placed during the scene of Lilly running out of her house in a panic, I added the audio clip before the shadow figure is shown and added a long fade in to foreshadow the scene starting quiet and slowly fading into a loud heartbeat.

This process was very interesting as I saw firsthand how much the sound effects add to the film and the level of detail that can be included through sound effects. This process was relatively simple and only took a slight bit more time than expected because I took my time fading the audio and making sure they were leveled in volume.