Sound Research

Our short film initially required only two sound tracks. One for the production logo roll-in and another one for the background score throughout the film. Firstly, we began with the research on sound scores and which would most complement our short films genre. We started we the research of classical, folk and all sorts of cultural music, most heard of in Pakistan. This idea of using cultural music in our short film was generated keeping in mind two aspects; firstly because it was inspired by a similar short film opening sequence that we had seen on YouTube-its genre was not in any way similar to ours, however it was shot in the very middle of Lahore and had a very traditional look and feel about it and secondly because it went well with our short film's content which featured the societal reality of Pakistan, hence it reflected our country's culture and traditional very effectively. 

                                        

    

We used YouTube as our main channel as this search engine featuring all sorts of media content contained numerous contributions by individuals and hence gave us the unique and very versatile content to choose from. We decided upon the independent work of two instrumental artists. They were basically tabla players 

and the text they has floated online had a sensuous feel to it which could easily be edited into whichever form we wanted it to be in. We could raise its pitch to conjure up suspense, we could speed it up to show a series of events in a continuous flow, etc. Once our rough cut was made, we started adding the audio to it , however we had to choose which instrumental would help us the most and also, we had to convert the avi file into an mp3 track. For this purpose, we googled the various converters available online and found one which is used the most i.e. the Format Factory which converted files very promptly, hence, saving up on quality time.

                                         

Once we had the mp3, we listened to both the tunes again and tried to fit it in our rough cut and imagined its impact on the film that'll effect the audience and decided upon using Shaurya Rawal's instrumental. As our rough cut was ready, we started up on putting in the background score and many a times fiddles with it as premiere was new to us and we were still novices. Layering and sequencing was a major constraint that we faced which led to a lot of wastage of time as we still hadn't understood understood the concept of adding the audio on different layers every time a new video sequence began. After many makes and remakes, we finally got our background score properly synced into the video with the right pitches, gains, cross fades and speed duration.

Having done this, we now researched out logo roll-in score. For this, we were looking for something very interesting catchy to go with our logo designation which had a very bright and jolly look and feel to it. When we started googling this requirement, we came across the most used search engine for this purpose, which was sounddogs.com. This was one webpage that had a little too much of content in it and filtering through it for what we exactly required was one tedious task. Hence, to save on time, we used mp3skull.com which automatically filtered through sounddogs' content and gave us the exact content that we required.

Once we had this score too, we fitted it in with our roll-in effect by editing it through the right places and got what we wanted. Hence, our sound research was widely assisted by the usage of Web 2.0 as it provided us with useful search engines like YouTube, Google, Mp3 Skull, Sounddogs and format factory.