Finalizing details!!

         Andddd we are live from the Florida Keys!! 

        Now that our much-needed spring break has begun we had plenty of time to work on the last details of our opening. Remember when I said that we were almost done editing the sounds in? Well...we weren't :/ We were apart for the first half of spring break and I hadn't been able to get Violette's feedback on the sound editing, so lets say we had a lot of catching up when we met up two days ago. I showed her what I had so far and after sharing our opinions we decided we wanted to scratch a lot of it off. For example, we both HATED the way the prayer sounded, so we got to work on finding something else we could use for the background of the funeral; we ended up using a sort of sung-prayer sound instead which wouldn't clash with the voice-over we still had to add. We also added chatter to the gas station store's background for it to sound more realistic and adjusted the volume of some sounds; so yeah little details like those really added up and forced us to spend more time than planned fixing these issues. 

        I think that sound editing was definitely the most challenging aspect of this whole project so far, not only because of how tedious it was to sync the sound to the video itself, but also choosing sounds that create the most realistic atmosphere and effect. For example, using footstep sounds that sound as they would on concrete floors when Grace is walking on the parking lot with her heels. Another huge part of this was volume and sound perspective; lowering and increasing the volume of some sounds was necessary to create the desired effect and put focus on vital points like the voice-over and making these decisions not only required my perspective but also other's opinions, as my ears had gotten so used to the sounds that I couldn't tell the difference anymore. This also depended on sound perspective; depending on where the shot was pointed and focused we had to alter sound volumes to make it as realistic as possible, like lowering the sound of outside atmosphere when entering the shop.

        Overall, it was a great experience. I practiced patience and attention to detail and I think that it was definitely a skill I got to improve. After fixing the general sound we got to work on the voice-over, our main sound. Once I arrived at the Keys we got Sienna to record her lines for the voice-over. We did this in the bathroom to avoid having any unwanted background noise and then used wired headphones with a little microphone to enhance the sound. After we inputted the recording into CapCut and then I got to cutting the long Voice-over into smaller sections in order to spread it out through the opening in the way we wanted. We decided where, when, and at what volume the voice over would be and experimented with all of these factors to choose what we liked best. 

        Lastly, we just just fixed the minor detail of bird sounds at the beginning of the opening when Grace was outside. After showing the rough draft to Violette's mom she gave us the feedback that the bird sounds we had added prior sounded happy and optimistic, which didn't match the piece's tone. So, we decided to scratch that and use crow sounds instead, making it more eerie. 

        All that's left now is to transfer the finished product to iMovie ( again...) and add the title and credits. We chose to use this app instead of CapCut because it already had templates for the titles which were easier to use than CapCut's and we were more familiar with the font choices. 

This was our recording session in the bathroom!!