KG - Summary of research on Sound and SFX

After reading up on Sound and Special effects in the Guardian guide to making video we have found that in terms of sound the most important things for us are:

• Not to layer too much sound, not to simply mask it with sound.
• Be careful with licensed and copyrighted material, so look for websites providing royalty free music and sound effects.
• We need it to sound as real as possible, as well as having atmospheric music in places, so we need to think about room-tone.
• We need to choose sound that doesn't have any previous connotations or links that may detract the attention away from where we are anchoring it.

In terms of Special Effects, there isn't much that we require for our particular idea, although many of them sounded very interesting and would have been fun to play around with. The section on horror was very useful and many of the shots suggested we had decided to use anyway, such as:

• The 'back of the head' shot - we wanted shots like this [more P-O-V style], but on reading this article we have decided to experiment with emphasising this in the horror style for effect.
• The 'Killer's eye view' shot - we wanted P-O-V shots of both the girl and the doll for contrast, so in the theme of our film it is debatable as to who the 'killer' is and so whose eye-view it is, but having both will help create this atmospheric ambiguous effect.
• The 'killer in the mirror' shot - we are attempting this in a way, in that the doll will constantly find its way into the shot, whether it be visible in a mirror or just slightly to the side, but either way it will always be visible.