Music editing, trimming and constructing in Final Cut Pro and Audacity

Here you can see how we have divided James Blake's song Don't You Think I Do. This is because we only needed certain parts of the song and we had preferences as to what sounds suited certain clips. For example the opening shots of fast-forwarded London city, the train and the pan shot of Kings X all had subtle, quiet and 'opening' type sounds that eases the viewer gently into the film. At times we repeated sounds, cut parts from the end of the song and re positioned them and we also used the fade tool for a continuity blend between tracks and between tracks to voiceovers. Other editing involved changing the volume of the sound as when overlayed with voiceovers, the dialogue is more important to hear than the music, yet the music continues the mood and atmosphere that we are trying to convey through our noir, mystery genre. This screenshot was taken during the first stages of editing and we still need to fill in various gaps (not all), with sound effects and our own music (later explored in this post).

Here at about 1:45 secs, you can see where we have added a Footsteps foley sound effect. Although we collected our own foley sounds of Poppy's heels, we thought the Final Cut SFX of footsteps sounded better and clearer, especially as the shot we used it on was where she walks through a puddle. These foley sounds add a much more realism to the single shot alone along with the entire film for the audience listening/watching.

During editing we noticed a continuity error whereby Poppy appears in a mid shot in the lift with her head directing to her right, and the clip then cuts to a close up reflection shot of her looking to the left. To correct this continuity error we simply used the Effects tab in FCP, selected the Flipped effect and dragged it over the clip. This worked seamlessly with no problems as there was nothing in the shot (such as text/signs) that would've looked abnormal had it been flipped. 

At 2:25 secs you can see lots of short sounds constructed together. Here we used the FCP foley footsteps sound but cut the clip. In order to make the foley sound correspond with Poppy's footsteps, we needed to place each footstep sound in to the timeline in sync with her walking. This is time consuming and difficult to get accurate however once finished it looked and sounded very effective! You can also see another two foley sounds we used: Traffic City and Crowd Walla Bar. These two sounds simply added quiet background noise to our shots for a more complete, believable atmosphere for the viewer. The audio that was originally on these clips were too noisy and harsh sounding to be used along with the fact that much chatter can be heard between ourselves (my group) discussing shot ideas and directions whilst we filmed. 

This is a Mac application called Audacity which myself and Olivia discovered last year when constructing our music video. Last year we used it to crop one song into two and blend the two sounds together to make the entire music clip shorter to fit our music video. This time however we experimented with the effects on our audio from our video clips of Ryan and Alex to make gospel murmurring sounds which would act as an excellent base for a soundtrack or more sound effects in our film. Our favourite effect was the 'Echo' and is extremely apt for the audio scene where we want to fast forward the clip whilst Alex repeats things like "£11,000" "transaction" and "bank statement" to reinforce the identity theft and fraudulent themes in Identity. We simply export the sounds from Audacity, save as an mp3 file and import into Final Cut Pro