MM - Sound Design

I handled most of the sound design for the opening. I knew that the most crucial part of this would be the fight sounds as just the production sound recorded on the day didn't get the intensity of the fight across as the actors weren't actually hitting each other but only staging it for the camera. But I learned that not only is the actual impact sound important in establishing the hit, but also the woosh from the arm. This made it more dynamic. I searched the internet for such fight sounds. Primarily on freesound.org.

I decided to go find a pack of the fight sounds presumably by the same person, as this would have a greater consistency between variations in the hit sounds. Luckily I found some good packs online that were free to download. Most of the recorded audio good to use as it featured lots of foley sounds like clothes and grabs. Some sections had to be cut, when me and Taran could be heard. 

The other sounds like the phone clicks and the coin toss needed to be there to make it believable and so create a rich sound scape. The other important set of sounds we needed was of our main lead actor Ollie and his strangling sounds. The ones recorded on set seemed a little unrealistic as we hadn't known what strangling sounded like on the day so we just told him to cough and act like he was short of breath. It was difficult to secure him in a similar location to get the correct ambiance, so we resorted to using Taran as the voice of Ollie, hoping that we would change the pitch of his voice to match.

But this seemed strange and still didn't sound right, so only a little of this was used. Then I thought of looking through the other takes and shots from the day and extracting certain realistic sounding parts and inserted them into gaps in areas of silence, where he would still be making noise. I also tried to put them in parts where we couldn't see his mouth as then it would be clear that the noise was added in post. 

We have not started on putting in the music yet, as we think we could align some of the beats to the hits in the music.