The Soundtrack of the Thriller

Audio is one of the most important parts of a film as it creates the atmosphere and creates the representation of the characters and the situation in which they find themselves.

For most of the opening the footage is muted. This is because I did not need those audio clips at all. The shots of the moon were silent anyway, but then with the tilt and some of the other shots my voice can be heard giving directions and this led to me muting those particular sections. The running footage and the final line in the opening are also muted as these particular clips had audio editing that required me to save them to a separate file.

The image above shows the rest of the audio clips in my Thriller. On the top, the edited audio for the running sequence can be seen, as can the gun shot and the edited audio for the final line. On the bottom is the music I am using for my Thriller.

To edit the audio for the running sequence I had to utilise the free audio editing software Audacity and its Noise Removal function to minimise the sound of the wind allowing for the foot steps to be heard much clearer. I did this for all three clips in the sequence and I believe that they have been fixed to the best of my abilites without using foley to create the foot steps sound effect.

The final line had similar effects to the running sequence, with a lot of the background noise removed. This was so that when it was imported into Sound Forge Audio Studio 10 and the volume was increased, there was as little background noise as possible. I believe that this worked quite effectively as the line is clearly audible and there is no background buzz.

The gun shot was sourced from this website and I believe that it is a royalty free website as all of the sound effects on it are downloadable and require no payment. While I may be wrong in this assumption, there are so many gun shot sound effects on the internet that I'm sure this one would not be recognised but I would also guess that since it was on the type of website it was that it is completely free. I did have to edit it slightly, removing the noise at the end to make the sound effect sharper and crisper against the silence.

The music for the opening sequence was created by James Cooper specifically for my Thriller.

I asked him if he could do this for me and gave him some rough cues for the major scene changes. At first he sent me two songs, one that was two minutes long and another that was one minute.
intro (scrap the pleasantrys) by Nathanal
Against the Clock by Nathanal
I was overjoyed at these because they had the perfect style and atmosphere to them that I wanted to present in my Thriller. So, I asked him if he could amalgamate them into one song and I gave him all of the scene change cues so that the music would sync up perfectly with the footage.

After some time he got back to me with the next version of the soundtrack.
Rich-113-210 edit by Nathanal
When this was placed into my Thriller it fitted absolutely perfectly and I am glad that I asked James to create the music for me because it fits so well. James says that he still needs to edit it slightly and mess around with the balancing of the instruments, however, I think that it is amazing as it is and I will certainly be impressed if the next version surpasses this one.